The future of Linux mint after Ubuntu goin snap?

[Tolayon]

First off, a probably lesser known fact about Snaps:
Unlike Flatpaks, which as far as I know are explicitly designed for gui applications like web browsers, multi media players, productivity software etc, Snaps where originally meant for IOT purpose (and in second row server usage). That's why there are so many Snaps ingrained already at system level in Ubuntu (just open a terminal in a brandnew standard Ubuntu install and type in "lsblk" or "snap list", you will see what I mean). Luckily, all of them will get seamlessly replaced by their Debian-based counterparts a soon as you uninstall them one by one and then also remove "snapd" itself.

Now, on gui level Snaps are treated more like step childs by the Canonical team, which is also the reason why Alan Pope left (as stated in a post on reddit). Pope was and probably still is a big Snap enthusiast, but he just couldn't get the Canonical devs to take more care of their gui implementation. Those Snaps though still will evolve and improve, but not nearly as fast as desired or - depending on your own perspective - feared.

That's also the reason why not more packages are being pushed to Snap-only versions.
On the contrary, last time I looked the Snap version of Inkscape had been removed, because people where complaining about its instability, rendering it de facto useless for even the simpliest tasks.

[benali72]

For its user community, I hope the Mint Team makes the right choice --

==> snaps as an option, not for forced adoption.

Thank you.

[JoeFootball]

snaps as an option, not for forced adoption.

https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedoc ... /snap.html

[benali72]

@JoeFootball, thank you for that link and the info!

[ne0h]

Hi everyone,
I was thinking about something. Ubuntu is heavily switching to using the snap format, which as we know slows down system startup insanely. in addition to various other issues. Mint doesn't use and include snaps by default, I guess not to have these problems. How will it go in the future when ubuntu is fully built on snapd?
Will Mint switch exclusively to LMDE?

[acerimusdux]

They have been improving snap startup times, I don't think that is the major issue. I think the major issues with snap is that Canonical has essentially made it a proprietary system where they have full control, when there are perfectly good free open source alternatives like flatpak which can do the same thing.

I do think depending more on Debian is a reasonable alternative. After the release of 20.3 this month, the Mint team will be working on DE5, which should be interesting. And, while Cinamon is the default desktop for LMDE, I'm currently running Cinamon, XFCE, and LXQt all on Debian testing, with no real issues. So I suspect the Mint team could likely offer a full Mint experience for other desktops based on Debian, if they need to do that.

I guess the question is, what of importance does Ubuntu add at this point? The main things I see are better support for new hardware (at least compared to Debian stable), and for proprietary firmware, and a smooth installation process. But maybe there are some things I'm missing.

I see two ways you can go here. If you base it on Debian stable, that would provide the best stability and fewer problems, but would likely require greater reliance on things like flatpaks by those who want to keep some popular applications more up to date.

An alternative might be basing on Debian testing, which would allow keeping things well up to date with deb packages, at the cost of having more bugs occur from time to time. The difficulty here might be with the additions supplied by the Mint team. They wouldn't want underlying libraries they rely on to be updating and breaking their own software. So they would have to either pin some things to prevent updates. Or maybe the Mint team themselves could rely on flatpaks to package some of their own additions, in order to avoid any conflicts. Or, I guess they could just be vigilant about keeping their own packages up to date and compatible with testing, but I think this would be more of a challange.

[legacypowers]

When the time comes, if i will probably go with Debian, or Arch

[ne0h]

When the time comes, if i will probably go with Debian, or Arch

not LMDE?

[legacypowers]

When the time comes, if i will probably go with Debian, or Arch

not LMDE?

I will consider it, i always try to be within deb distros because i'm already comfortable, and moving to a different linux like Fedora, or Arch, or openSUSE may or may not require some adaptations that i will try to avoid(yes i'm lazy)