Canonical is planning an ‘All Snap’ desktop next year. It will likely be available side-by-side with the traditional deb-based installation we’ve been used to since 2004.
If the “All Snap” or “immutable” platform is to be a success, Canonical needs to get a grip on the broken, uninstallable, insecure, and outdated snaps provided in the snap store.
As I mentioned, there’s around five thousand snaps in the store. Hundreds of them haven’t been touched in years. Some developers have just abandoned their packages.
I want to see this situation improve. In general, Canonical should incentivise the promotion of applications and dis-incentivise letting applications languish.
I’d like to like Snaps, but the main thing that put me off them was their inability to see: • Fonts • Printers/Scanners • Other Internal Hard Drives (other than Home) • Cameras • USB Sticks • Anything in system folders • Other software, or plugins
This was when they were a pretty new thing though - so, fingers crossed, have they managed to deal with this permissions thing yet? Something like Flatseal, or Android’s “This program would like to access this folder and your camera - Allow/Deny”?