Nice corporate bullshit article again, that have first thousands of worlds to tell you how they favor diversity... And this is why they will do something to ensure that you don't use anything else than their shitty snap!
I still don't understand this obsession with snap.
One of the reasons Ubuntu effectively lost the privileged spot they had won, among Linux distributions, is this obsession with rewriting backend systems instead of focusing on what brought them users in the first place: all-around polish and ease of use. These things end up generating flamewars and ill-will across users and advocates, and in most cases they simply die after some time.
They should focus again on what really matters. But I'm told Shuttleworth's mind doesn't work like that.
I'm pretty sure what really matters to them is making money which they weren't doing but increasing have been doing since shifting focus from what you and others here seem to think they should be focusing on.
They definitely didn't make money from Unity or Mir, which is what I was referring to. In fact, they started making money when they abandoned those silly dreams, including Ubuntu Phones, and focused again on their bread and butter: providing a Linux experience that is both familiar and polished.
Snap is the last of their pointless flamewars, achieving nothing but a slowdown in adoption - the only metric that really differentiates them from the pack.
Dark pattern: a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things
The 'interface' (tool availability) has been crafted such that users are likely to favor Snap over Flatpak... because Flatpak now takes a step that only serves to prop up Snap: installation of the runtime
I don't want to overstate the significance of this -- it's about as dark as dawn-break. Canonical is still maintaining/offering it, and I can get behind supporting Their Thing.
The worst thing about this is the messaging. If they had just done the thing and said nothing, I'd have nothing to complain about.
It could be taken as curation -- the messaging aims to convince that fewer options = more better.
edit: Some irony to this is we'd be closer to their idealized state of 'one way to install' had they instead chosen to adopt Flatpak over insist that Snap has to happen.
The ignorance about dark patterns is partially innocent and partially motivated. Some people cannot believe that their favorite kind of company (OSS, for example) would ever lie to them; the thought of it is too painful to bear. Or they can't believe their favorite company (Apple, for example) would lie to them or lie to others.
Okay, but can you explain why getting rid of an obsolete and broken packaging system and replacing it with one that's nearly modern is a "dark pattern"?
They're doing stuff a different way. They're getting rid of messy, broken, obsolete .deb and switching to something that's nearly as advanced as what Haiku had five years ago, Mac OSX had nearly 20 years ago, and RiscOS had 35 years ago...
Same here, generally -- as a user I don't really give a bother.
As long as I can avoid building from source / hunting deps for the most part, I'm good. I'll do this for maybe 10% of what I need; beyond that it's untenable.
If I were trying to publish my thing(s) I may care more, but probably not -- I just maintain several RPMs for other projects on Fedora/EL derivatives.
Ubuntu tends to only support these kinds of things for a few years and then they drop it. I suspect that either later this year or sometime next year they will drop it. Could be wrong, but here's hoping.
