CAREY SCHUG via Talk wrote on 2025-08-09 15:09:
I know ubuntu is evil
It is not evil, actually. Neither is Canonical. I realize Carey might not be expressing his own opinion, but that of a small niche group of zealots, but I'll address this to those folks. How it can be "evil" to give away - for *free* - high quality software? That's something I'll never understand. Sure, it's not got the exact collections of packages wanted by every user, and an "init system [sic]" (actually a services management system) that is a crime against humanity or some such nonsense, and in other ways is not the exact thing the person receiving the *free* software wants, but that is not evil.
I guess one alternative is to find non-snap installs.
I've done that with Thunderbird & Firefox. The snaps were pretty nice, but I think clicking a mailto: link in Firefox didn't open an email in Thunderbird due to the confinement (sandboxing) level that Mozilla chose. But, for node.js, having snaps has been great. They're not confined and it's nice to be able to run multiple versions concurrently.
Is there any possibility snaps will de-duplicate in the future, or does the basis for how they work make that impossible?
Who knows? That would be a *lot* of work, so I doubt it. File systems like ZFS have built-in de-duplication, so that's an option. It'll use more in memory & CPU usage, so expanding disk space is probably cheaper.
it seems to me that this way I could have several versions of some basic tool installed, and different applications would just automatically use the correct one.
That's something snaps can help with - multiple versions. But probably not do-able via $path because applications are installed using system-wide libraries normally.
help us ubuntu-morons transition to flatpacks
apt install flatpak