Snaps: a failed experiment

[Paul Smith]

On Mon, 2025-09-22 at 09:33 -0400, Šarūnas Burdulis wrote:
> Not sure what problem was being solved at Ubuntu that they came up
> with snaps.

The goal is to avoid the matrix of software-to-supported distribution
being a full mesh where if you want to support N pieces of software on
M different distributions and/or versions of distributions, you need
N * M different packages.

With snap, the idea is you need only N snap packages, then you can run
that snap in any distribution or version of a distribution.

Of course, there are downsides to this as well: nothing is free. 
Unfortunately the advantages are almost all gained by the people
maintaining the packages, while the downsides are almost all felt by
the people using the packages.  That's probably why maintainers
generally like snaps, and users are more likely to not like snaps :).


So for example, I need to continue to run on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS for
reasons, but I don't want to be stuck with Emacs 26 which is the
version of Emacs that was provided with that LTS.  There is an Emacs
snap which is updated regularly, with the snap author only needing to
generate one package that runs on all different versions of Ubuntu.  On
the other hand, the Emacs PPA is not updated as often especially for
older distributions like mine, because it's a lot more work.