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Ubuntu turns 20: 'Oracular Oriole' shows this old bird's still got plenty of flight
(www.theregister.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I don’t use Linux either, but a quick bit of research tells me it’s like an App Store and software that is specific to Linux. It allows for ease of installing/uninstalling programs but it can can run slow, seems redundant to what flatpaks already does, and isn’t fully fleshed out which leads to weird errors.
I’m guessing it’s because Linux is more hands on and this takes some agency away from users who feel like it might hurt privacy?
That’s what I’m reading anyway. Someone who is more familiar can correct me if I am off base.
The issues are twofold: Linux distros historically update software through a package manager. Something that was working fine for everyone, however it was causing a lot of work for maintainers. They got together and designed a packaging format for software that works across all Linux distributions called 'flatpak'. However, Ubuntu decided to create an alternative called Snap, which solves the same problem, except it's not used by anyone else.
Also, there's some implementation details that make it look messy in your system (every application is mounted as it's own filesystem, so if you use tools to list your disk's there's a bunch of weird spammy looking drives and things like that).
Didn't it also used to be noticeably slower than apt installed apps? This was one of the reasons I got rid of it at the time, Ive heard it has better performance now but not tried it.
I think that's mostly solved, but yeah, some of the sandbox stuff affected performance.