• proprietary server (snap store), unlike flatpak
• snapd only allows one server (but it is foss so you could just patch it), unlike flatpak
• nonexistent security on snap store, multiple times malware, unlike flatpak
• no sandboxing without apparmor and specific profiles, so not cross platform, unlike flatpak
• the system apps are also requiring apparmor, so not cross platform
• they lack granular permission systems afaik
• they concur with flatpak, which is horrible as we need a universal packaging format, not 3
• seemingly no reproducible builds?
• no separation between all, opensource, verified repo, unlike flatpak
• they pollute the mount list with all the loop devices

And people complain abour resource usage etc, but that is just separating apps from the system. Flatpak does the same.

The server is proprietary and last I checked you can’t even turn off auto-updating or verify the binaries they push to you.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-mint-dumps-ubuntu-snap/

In the Ubuntu 20.04 package base, the Chromium package is indeed empty and acting, without your consent, as a backdoor by connecting your computer to the Ubuntu Store. Applications in this store cannot be patched, or pinned. You can’t audit them, hold them, modify them, or even point Snap to a different store. You’ve as much empowerment with this as if you were using proprietary software, i.e. none. This is in effect similar to a commercial proprietary solution, but with two major differences: It runs as root, and it installs itself without asking you.

Research what happened to Upstart, Mir or Unity. It won’t take long until snap becomes one of them. Somebody at canonical seems to desperately obsess over having something unique, either as a way to justify canonicals existance or even in the hopes of making the next big thing. Over all these years they never learned that whatever they do exclusively will always fall short of any other joint efforts in the linux world, because they always lack the technical advances, ability/will to push it for a prolonged time and/or the non-proprietary-ness. So instead of collaborating like every serious linux vendor, they’re polluting their distro with half-assed, ever changing and unwanted experiments. They’re even hijacking apt commands to push their stupid snap stuff against the users intent. With the shengians they’re pulling Ubuntu cannot be relied on, and with that they’re sabotaging their own success and drive away any commercial customers that generate revenue.

So like… I understand the why behind flatpaks and snaps, but I’m an end-user, and more often than not they just make things more difficult, in my opinion.

They’re really great for server setups for sort of keeping each individual application from being able to deeply influence other applications or the root filesystem.

But this means if I installed the Spotify snap (at least when I last tried a few years ago) I had to jump through a bunch of hoops to get it to be able to access my media files where all my music was stored.

So like I said, great for out-of-the-box-server setups where the everything is a little separated from each other (kind of like Docker, from what I understand, but at the app-level? I could be wrong here.) because it helps default security settings and interactions from getting confusing quickly.

However, for your casual end-user, it can quickly become a confusing nightmare if you actually do need your applications more easily interacting with one another because you’re just trying to write an email.

Anyway, that’s my personal opinion: The reasons they exist server-side are pretty solid, but the reasons they exist on desktops for the end-user are less compelling and often result in user frustration.