Snap in KDE Neon

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I have a general question about software stores in KDE Neon.

Is it planned to deactivate the snap service in KDE Neon and only provide the Deb and Flatpak software sources, like it is done in the Linux distribution TuxedoOS.

Greetings
Bluelupo

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I doubt it.

There is no reason to do so, since the user may want this, but also can easily remove it (and/or Flatpak support as well) if they don’t. Or just not use it.

Neon comes with both Flatpak and Snap support.

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Hi claydoh,
Thanks for the info.
But then I still have two questions about it. Do I have any disadvantages if I remove the snap service on my Neon system or is not advisable?

Is there a useful tutorial specifically for Neon on how to remove the snap service from your system?

Greetings
Bluelupo

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You can remove it if you desire, it won’t break anything.

neon is just Ubuntu, so any tutorials for 22.04 will work.
Neon does not use the Snap of Firefox, so some of the work is already done. Just uninstalling snap, snapd, and plasma-discover-backend-snap should do it.

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I wouldn’t kick snaps to the curb! I am working very hard at getting all the KDE application snaps done.

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At least in our LUG are some Ubuntu users, where the snap packages generate so much overhead, that they can’t work anymore. Especially the Big Blue Button Net-meetings we use, are unseable with snap packages. If we switch to standard (deb) it works fine (100% → 50% load on a double core Intel Pentium system). Also the 32GB HDD will be fast to small.
Snap is a good solution if you have a server, but is not the best solution on a Desktop at all! It was the reason to leave *buntu Systems more and more (is not acceptable for non professionals).

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We’re working more on snaps. We have got up some PRs to kclock and kweather already. Sooner we’ll have awesome integration of snaps with the plasma desktop via the snap-kcm. Also, automations with the snaps, so that they are updated with each release. And many more. Hopefully, users will find new interest in the kde snaps. Much more refreshed and redesigned.

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This is kinda too anecdotal.

Yes for low storage systems native packages (as well as sticking to just one GUI toolkit) are the best option.

But this is about Flatpak vs. Snap as they are basically doing the same.

I appreciate all the work on Snaps, but the concept is simply flawed:

  • the isolation just works with Apparmor and the specific snap patches
  • the daemon writes stuff to the system dir /snap so it does not work on many distros
  • it is a duplicated effort compared to Flatpak
  • there is a centralized store and no possibility to use others
  • the store was not well protected at all in the past

Snaps do work for all levels of components, because they just use Apparmor, while Flatpak uses Bubblewrap, so the Kernel and a few more things cannot be flatpakked.

But it is basically an Ubuntu-only technology.

This is kind of a political “do we support Canonical” decision. I see how this is kinda controversial, but Linux Mint, TuxedoOS, System76’ Pop!_OS, VanillaOS and more all do this, using an Ubuntu base.

I think the developer efforts could be better used on Flatpak, even though the developer experience may be worse.

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true. But, not anymore from the upcoming kernel 6.12. You can find more about it from the Ubuntu forum post on kernels.

No, it writes to /var/lib/snapd/snap and then it’s either automatically or manually symlinked to /snap folder, as stated in the docs

debateable, because flatpak came after snaps. Both have their pros and cons.

there is possibility. The fact is, Canonical is not ready open it, because, the same thing happened with Launchpad, when they made it Open Source, the contributions or the enthusiasm from the community was very less.

There is a big reason for that. I agree with you.

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That is a shame. Wasted effort as far as I am concerned. I will NEVER use a Snap, and it will take a gun to the head to get me to use flatpak. The are both masters of bloat, redundancy, and incompatibility. Sandboxes are fine for servers, but are endlessly problematic on the desktop. When I want platform independence I use a portable appimages, which work. They do not require installing, operate in user space, and make sense.

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I got some confirmation from the Ubuntu Summit, that they are also looking to enable snap support in their store and have requested for a rust binding of the snapd api.