Snap sucks. The way open source is straying further and further from its principles is highly annoying. The whole idea that you'd need a container like environment to install an application on a Unix system is very far from where we should be. What's the point of dynamic linking if we then end up shipping half an OS with an application just to get around dependency hell? Might as well ship a pre-linked binary that just does system calls.
And it's yet another way to do an end run around repositories, instead you will sooner or later get an app-store like environment that can be controlled by some entity. These large companies should stop fucking around with Linux, it was fine the way it was. Just fix the bugs and leave the rest to the application developers.
> Just fix the bugs and leave the rest to the application developers.
Some dev flat out[0] refuse (and I am not debating if it's right or wrong) to package their app for every distro (even major ones: ubuntu, debian, arch, rhel/fedora) so it's up to distro maintainers to package them so users are always at the end of a line of other people packaging the apps (either through distro packages or sandboxed one click installer).
[0] Words are too strong and user CJefferson https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24384206 is right to call me out on that. I agree, sorry about that. Poor choice of words. I had a very specific example in mind but there's obviously a whole gamut of reasons for not packaging. My position is that we can't nor should we expect dev to package their apps for the distro we use. Also it's no like app devs and distro/os devs/maintainers are living in hermetic boxes and their code/apps never interacting or evolving. Not editing out for context.
I don't like "flat-out refuse". I don't "refuse" to package my apps for every distro any more than I "refuse" to do my neighbour's gardening.
I tried packaging for Debian once and after 2 days I have up -- I have neither the time or patience to do work for distros I don't use for free.
If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend looking at fpm for packaging. Unless you're doing something weird or need an obscure format, it is the tool you want.