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Ubuntu turns 20: 'Oracular Oriole' shows this old bird's still got plenty of flight
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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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).
Native package managers were not "working fine for everyone", the software and libraries in them are often very outdated and contain custom patches that don't come from the original software authors.
So you often end up dealing with bugs that were already fixed and the fixes released months ago.
Other distros were faster with updating packages, or for Ubuntu specifically you had PPAs or repositories maintained by the vendor.