Move to the Snap package format
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Hello, I'm new here! On Linux we are moving to a new packaging format(s) that focus a lot more on sand boxing and being easier to install on many different Linux distributions. At the moment when a Linux user goes to install Vivaldi they can only go to your webpage and download it which comes either in a .deb or rpm package, if you offered a snap you would streamline the whole installation process. What is a snap? A snap is a fancy zip file containing an application together with its dependencies, and a description of how it should safely be run on your system, especially the different ways it should talk to other software. Most importantly snaps are designed to be secure, sandboxed, containerised applications isolated from the underlying system and from other applications. Snaps allow the safe installation of apps from any vendor on mission critical devices and desktops. Learn more about snaps here: http://snapcraft.io/ Here is how you would upload them to the Ubuntu Software Center for users to easily install the application rather than going to the site: http://snapcraft.io/docs/build-snaps/publish It's pretty early days for snaps but we already seeing the likes of the VLC player transition to snap, I would like to see my favourite browser join too. Firefox have also stated to move to snap packages later this year. So anyway, lets get the conversation rolling. Daniel McGuire [url=https://wiki.ubuntu.com/daniel-mcguire351]Ubuntu Member[/url]
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Hey mate, Ubuntu ist not linux! ubuntu change to snap but thats all at the moment, no other distro do it too so far I know.
Using snap the maintainer looses control of the programms. -
Hey mate, Ubuntu ist not linux! ubuntu change to snap but thats all at the moment, no other distro do it too so far I know.
Using snap the maintainer looses control of the programms.I'm sure that even good distros will be infected by such things. Just like happened with the systemd cancer.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Snaps-Fedora-Arch-More
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Hi,
Snap is not the only game in town as far as the new "all inclusive" packaging go. We would have to support several of those if we decided to go down that path though. I'm not saying we won't support Snap. It's actually very tempting to distribute one all inclusive Vivaldi package that (in theory) runs on most flavors of Linux.
We will of course follow this development of Snap and the others closely. When the demand is there we will offer whatever our users are asking for. As always, it's you guys who determine where we are going, so even though I can't promised Snap packages in a week this thread has value telling us that there are users who would like to see all inclusive packaging, in this case Snap.
So stay tuned!
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Thanks for the reply.
I do know that Snaps are just one of the options, but as an Ubuntu member I'm in that camp. Plus I see it being the biggest and widest adopted format. However, to me I don't care if it is Snap or flatpacks or whatever! I know it's early days but as I said I think it's good to get conversations going early on.
Oh and to the others, I know Linux is not just Ubuntu.
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Ubuntu is certainly a big mover and shaker due to being so popular and the basis for many other spin-off distributions. They usually try to do their own thing if possible, because other solutions are Not Invented Here. A fine example is the Mir display server. This kind of behaviour is, to a certain degree, expected from a commercial company that has to differentiate its products from the competition. The extreme case is an Apple-style walled garden.
I would imagine the Ubuntu community to be happy to fill the need for Snap-packaged versions of popular software, including Vivaldi. Other distributions already do this with their own packaging formats. Given that Snap seems to be meant for mission critical systems, I wouldn't expect a need for any other versions of a web browser than the current stable one. No matter how you sandbox it, it will crash your system if there is a severe enough bug.
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Ubuntu is certainly a big mover and shaker due to being so popular and the basis for many other spin-off distributions. They usually try to do their own thing if possible, because other solutions are Not Invented Here. A fine example is the Mir display server. This kind of behaviour is, to a certain degree, expected from a commercial company that has to differentiate its products from the competition. The extreme case is an Apple-style walled garden.
Sorry but that is just insane. I'm not going to talk Wayland/Mir since this isn't the topic. People accuse NIH with "this product has been in the making for years and doesn't do what we need it to".
I would imagine the Ubuntu community to be happy to fill the need for Snap-packaged versions of popular software, including Vivaldi. Other distributions already do this with their own packaging formats. Given that Snap seems to be meant for mission critical systems,.
Snappy isn't just for the Ubuntu community at all. The recent snappy event in Germany was attended by the likes of Suse, Arch, Elementary, Mate, and many other people outside of Ubuntu! Snappy is coming at light speed with the help of main distributions helping out.
The latest Linux Unplugged podcast episode has a great rundown of that event.
@kumiponi:I wouldn't expect a need for any other versions of a web browser than the current stable one. No matter how you sandbox it, it will crash your system if there is a severe enough bug.
That is FUD.
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People accuse NIH with "this product has been in the making for years and doesn't do what we need it to".
There's always a reason isn't there. What they really need it to do is about the same thing as everyone else does, but different enough to warrant creating the same thing from scratch rather than contributing to an existing project.
Snappy isn't just for the Ubuntu community at all. The recent snappy event in Germany was attended by the likes of Suse, Arch, Elementary, Mate, and many other people outside of Ubuntu! Snappy is coming at light speed with the help of main distributions helping out.
There's no need to talk of other distributions when the only one that uses it is Ubuntu/Canonical. The key word in "coming at light speed" is coming, as in not there yet, if ever.
That is FUD.
No, it's true, and if you have some information that disproves it, I'm all ears.
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I think Vivaldi snaps are likely at some point as Ubuntu moves in that direction and considering that Ubuntu is such a popular distro. It is also the easiest way to support delta updates on Ubuntu which I think has great advantages and people will increasingly expect.
I am not yet convinced that they are a "universal" package format however. While snapd is available for other distros it is not installed by default and it remains to be seen if users of these distros will install it to get access to snaps. If they do that will give snaps more weight. Until then it is basically the (new) Ubuntu package format and my gut feeling is that it may remain that way. Even as an Ubuntu only format however, it is still interesting.
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@ruario said in Move to the Snap package format:
I think Vivaldi snaps are likely at some point as Ubuntu moves in that direction and considering that Ubuntu is such a popular distro. It is also the easiest way to support delta updates on Ubuntu which I think has great advantages and people will increasingly expect.
I am not yet convinced that they are a "universal" package format however. While snapd is available for other distros it is not installed by default and it remains to be seen if users of these distros will install it to get access to snaps. If they do that will give snaps more weight. Until then it is basically the (new) Ubuntu package format and my gut feeling is that it may remain that way. Even as an Ubuntu only format however, it is still interesting.
Hello. Opera has already joined. Are we going to stay behind?
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The only truly universal package format (works with a single command on any linux distribution) is AppImage or just plain old statically linked binarys.
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If your system supports deb, rpm etc there really is no logical reason to install a snap package.
Snaps bring with them their own issues as well. 1) Size - on the whole snaps. and the same goes for flatpak, are much bigger than a native app would be because they include all the dependencies, dependencies that are probably already on your system. 2) You may get theming issues in some distro's, you may get issues with them appearing in notification areas etc because they are not native. 3) the idea that snaps work with ease on any linux system is utterly flawed as well.
Snaps (And flatpak) have their place. They offer an option for people who's distro isnt supported by other versions. They may (in some instances) offer a more up to date version that is offered by your distro's software channel (this isnt an issue with vivaldi because they have their own ppa anyway).
If your system supports deb or rpm there really is no logical reason that I can think of why would install a snap or flatpak package..
The whole "sandbox" thing is overhyped as well. I can run any app I like on my system sandboxed with firejail. I can run $ firejail vivaldi, or $ firejail firefox or $ firejail transmission-gtk or anything I want...
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I hate snap because of its inherent wastefulness of HD-space. If Vivaldi is switching to it exclusively I will stop using it.
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@mrokii yeh, thats a huge issue.. flatpak is the same.. heres an example.. telegram flatpak.. 2.5GB https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DjItEdcWwAAa_hV?format=jpg
snaps are no different, by including all libraries the file sizes can be huge..
This is why there's no logical reason why anyone with a system that supports deb or rpm would use snap/flatpak.
a random distro that has compatibility issues, or very old libraries. yes, but any modern distro. no.
And yes, like you, If Vivaldi was exclusively snap or flatpak I would go back to opera or chromium. But it wont happen so nothing to worry about.
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You do realize you can offer both a snap and a deb file right?
I just want a snap for it's automagic updating feature, also I've personally not experienced any storage issues from using snaps.
Yet again a repo would be nice aswell.
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Seems to me Opera was offering snaps, but there are issues ... since neither Opera nor Vivaldi comes with proprietary codecs, a snap version can't play proprietary media formats. With a regular package format you can install proprietary codecs separately and Vivaldi will use them; with a snap it doesn't.
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@mrmidnight why would you want auto updating? why is that a good thing. How many times have you had something force updates on you and ended up with bugs and regressions.
if you have the ppa then updates will show up in your package manager, just click update. that way you control what gets updated.
If anything, "automatic updates" is another reason not to use snaps.
Im one of these people who likes to read changelogs and check for issues before updating things
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As of today, Chromium, Firefox, Midori and Opera, have already released a snap package. Chromium additionally released 'chromium-ffmpeg' for codecs.
According to the snap website 14 distributions already support snap (and very likely can be installed in more): Arch Linux, Debian, elementary OS, Fedora, Gentoo, Linux Mint, Manjaro, Yocto, openSUSE, OpenWrt, Pop! OS, Solus, Raspbian and Ubuntu.
Preparing a snap package is not be that complicated. At first, Vivaldi can release a snap using the 'edge' or the 'beta' branch, which users may know is not 100% ready (as Thunderbird did).
As
mrmidnightsaid, deb and rpm can be still the main packages (until snap is widely adopted). I believe the idea is to increase the number of users using Vivaldi, and having a snap package can help to reach other distributions in which before was not so easy to support.I don't see any valid reason on why Vivaldi shouldn't follow that path. As you know, snaps are executed in a sandbox, which is ideal for browsers to increase security (I'm personally very interested in this point).
@Dimspace Why wouldn't you want to auto-update your browser? security updates should be applied as soon as they are released, right? If something gets broken, its easy to rollback to an early version when using snap.
Please don't take it personal, we all want Vivaldi success, so please consider adding a snap package.
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I found out this post from few days ago:
In the future, we hope this situation will improve, as we plan to introduce support for Snap packages.
Great news! Looking forward to it
... I guess that closes this discussion. -
According to the snap website 14 distributions already support snap
how many of those actually support snap natively? Mint doesnt support snap natively (and even once you install snap its pretty flakey).
only two of those support snapd by default. Ubuntu and Solus
