What tools to work with pkgs installed thru snap system

[Oliver Grawert]

hi,
Am Donnerstag, dem 25.11.2021 um 15:47 +0000 schrieb Chris Green:
> 
> Howver, IMHO, there are better systems than snap for doing this - the
> 
> appimage format that Digikam uses for example.  Snap seems to be a
> 
> sort of worst of both worlds compromise, it *isn't* wholly
> independent
> 
> of the operating system and libraries but it does produce a huge
> 
> executable including [most of] the libraries it needs.
> 
you can not really compare snap with appimage or even flatpak.

snap is a complete package format, initially developed for IoT,
embedded, indistrial, automotive, robotics, server, cloud use ... you
name it. 

support for desktop apps only came years after it was already in use in
the above contexts ... appimage/flatpak are solely a delivery mechanism
for desktop apps ...

there are library snaps that provide all shared libraries like the
gnome-3-38-2004 one, apps do not *have* to ship all libs but can easily
use content of other snaps (and most modern ones do) ...

snaps are also never unpacked on disk but are compressed filesystem
images that are loop mounted ... due to the compression a snap is
usually smaller than the equivalent content of a deb package with the
same binaries ... i.e. see the firefox snap that is ~60MB smaller than
the deb on disk:

ogra at acheron:~$ apt-cache show firefox|grep Installed-Size|head -1
Installed-Size: 221595
ogra at acheron:~$ snap info firefox|grep installed
installed:          93.0-1                 (631) 157MB deaktiviert

snaps are also only updated through binary deltas so that only changed
bytes are downloaded during an upgrade (many of the original use-cases
in which snaps are used operate over 2G/3G networks)

it is true though that snaps are not completely OS independent, they
use kernel features for their security sandboxing so you need a modern
kernel (above 4.4). they are also making a lot use of systemd features
to manage the loop mounting etc so your system needs to be booted with
systemd ... beyond these two hard requirements they are actually
completely distro independent ...

ciao
	oli
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