Episode: 4238
Title: HPR4238: Snaps are better than flatpaks
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4238/hpr4238.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 21:52:44

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4238 for Wednesday the 30th of October 2024.
Today's show is entitled, Snaps are Better Than Flat Packs.
It is the 70th show of some guy on the internet, and is about 15 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, Scoti reminds everyone on the joy of using snap packages.
You are listening to a show from the Reserve Q. We are airing it now because we had free
slots that were not filled.
This is a community project that needs listeners to contribute shows in order to survive.
Please consider recording a show for Hacker Public Radio.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio, I'm your host, some guy on
the internet.
Alright, today we are doing another show in the car.
I got my laptop out, I'm not driving, I'm just in my car, I need to specify that.
And today we are going to be talking about Snaps versus Flat Packs, right?
I know you guys are going to love this one because you are going to get the chance to
hear the truth.
I need to stop and put out a little announcement.
This message is brought to you by some guy on the internet who is known for Pearl Cleaching
Panic Ridin' Nonsense.
Pearl Cleaching Panic Ridin' Nonsense.
So I hope you guys enjoy, right?
That's the end of the announcement.
And this is going to be a quick one because everybody knows Snaps are superior, very simple.
Snaps are safe, reliable, software that is backed by a company with an excellent reputation.
They are mostly the Snaps themselves are open source.
So the Snaps are open source.
So you figure out what argument you want to make beyond that statement that I just made
and that's your argument.
And you got the, I'll be generous this time.
You got 72 hours to dispute this argument, right?
This show.
From the time that this show airs, you got 70, oh, does somebody, looks like somebody's
already disputed it.
My phone's ringing.
It's vibrating.
Oh no, never mind, that's just my alarm.
Let me know, be careful.
You might end up recording too long, doing too many shows out here in the parking lot.
So yep, 72 hours from the time this show airs, if you, if you have a dispute and you wish
to challenge the fact, the undeniable fact that Snaps are superior to flat packs in every
way that you got to do so within 72 hours, otherwise, I mean, you can still do a show, don't
get me wrong.
Nothing stops you from doing a show, but I will be correct is what you need to understand.
All right.
I will be most accurate and correct and you will just have to live with that.
So there you go.
Now, I'm going to give you just a few reasons because there are too many list all here today.
All right.
I can be here until the next century telling you how, how Snaps are just safer and more reliable
because companies like canonical state their reputation on them, they invest tons of money
and hiring people, making sure that this technology works like it's supposed to, they partner
with other companies getting documentation out there.
So everybody knows how to, how to package their projects as a snap.
You know, for instance, what do you call it Firefox?
In the number of others, right, they go out there and they work with them except, except
in the Firefox example, I think Firefox actually just went, you do it for us, that kind
of thing, right?
But still, they, from what I've heard in the past, they've done a lot of work to help
other people really learn how to package their products as a snap.
Now they also have great documentation on it.
I have went over some of the documentation because I use Thunderbird and I have the Ubuntu
RSS feed and Thunderbird.
One of the shows I was going over and I was going over in the past was how to package
a project as a snap.
So I remember that they got documentation, even though I don't have a project that I
want to package as a snap because everything I'm using is kind of scratch my own age material.
No need for me to package that up and send it out.
But yeah, either way, if I wanted to, I could package my hello world as a snap and put
it out there for you.
And it will run way better than if it was packaged as a flat pack, just because snaps
are just superior, all right, backed by a company, which means they got a machine driving
it forward.
Everybody knows when you put a company in charge of it, you may not go in the direction
you want to go, but you're going to go in one direction and you're going to make progress
versus not all community projects do this.
But I mean, it's known that community projects that don't really have that engine in front
of it will, community projects that don't have the engine will sort of lose focus and end
up all over the place, got a school bus just pulled up.
Hopefully, I don't get blocked in here.
I need to figure out, yeah, I'm going to wrap this up in the bit and get out of here.
I don't want to get blocked in if they're letting our kids, I don't think they're letting
our kids.
I think, yeah, I'm not sure.
Anyway, you want to go for snaps, right, for security.
You got a company that puts their reputation on the line.
If anything happens, say somebody does get some sort of malware in through the snap system.
Once it gets delivered, it can be reported to a single place, right?
You can report it to canonical.
You know exactly who to give the issue to.
They then broadcast that, well, they're going to fix it first, obviously.
Then they broadcast to everyone because they should have some sort of metrics or whatever,
you know, how many people have gotten this snap?
Maybe they don't have the specific knowledge of it, right?
Like, Joe Blow over there, John Doe, Jane Doe, that kind of information, but they got
some numbers about how many times this snap was downloaded and maybe what regions, right?
Not to mention, I think you have to have an account or something like that to upload snaps
or whatever so they can go ahead and suspend that account and begin getting their users,
you know, the information they need, like, hey, if you downloaded this snap between these
dates or if you have that snap and then upgraded, well, snaps update the regularly anyways,
but I mean, if you manually updated or whatever, you were running the snap between these times,
these are some steps you could take to clean your system up.
And I think that's fantastic.
So that's some of the benefits of having, I guess, not just a company, like, it didn't
have to be a company, but just a single organization that set out to manage a project that large
because you're talking about software distribution for a number of different distributions, which
are compatible with, you know, snap D that can, that you can install stack, look at me
on tongue-tie here, that you can install snap D onto and then run snap packages.
Then some people will point out some old outdated information about snacks, they'll go,
old snaps are so slow and all this and then look, I'll grant you this.
In the beginning, not everything was as smooth and wonderful as it is today, right?
But you can do that with a lot of software, if that's the game you want to play, you
can point to a lot of software and talk about how rough it used to be or in the case
of, in the case of arch, I kid, I kid, I kid.
So snaps are great and they're safe.
We know that they're safe because, you know, sandboxing, all of that jazz, if you don't
know what that is, it's basically separating.
I wouldn't say from the file, it's isolating the program's access on the file system.
So the program that you're downloading with snaps and suppose flat pack also has, you
know, similar technology, you know, just making sure that the program doesn't just have
access to everything root and all of that, which is good.
You want that?
That provides some security.
Mostly, I think that security is beneficial in the server world because on, say,
you know, a desktop environment where users store all of the files they're using in the
home directory, well, if there was something malicious, it would still have access to the
files in the home directory, right?
I mean, I'll be able to touch root, but, you know, if they just want to be a jerk about
it, they could just wreck your home directory.
You know, but that's enough about that.
Back up your data, by the way.
Yeah, this message is also brought to you by just, you know, doing the right thing and
backing up your data.
Yeah.
End of message.
Also, when you're in the command line, here's another good thing about snaps.
When you're setting up a brand new system, I'm talking about a new can pave.
You can actually script snaps way better than you can flat packs.
So that means snaps are just made for the enterprise, right?
I mean, who wants to be there manually installing slow, inefficient flat packs that that nobody
knows where they came from, right?
There's no company behind them and anybody can upload them to the internet.
Good husbands, right?
So there's there's no way to really trace these things back.
Well, it used to be that way.
I need to play fair here now.
Flat pack has update the website and done a verification system and it's fantastic.
So I need to play fair.
If you're going to, if you're going to allow Ubuntu to rest on its current reputation,
not its past reputation, you need to do the same for flat packs.
So yes, it is, flat pack is now supporting verification so that you know, rather not
a package came from the original developers or just some community member has provided
the flat pack for others to benefit from.
And there is a difference, right?
You know, I imagine that most of the community members are trying to do the right thing.
They're not trying to, you know, slap in crypto miners and all kind of nonsense into
that package and send it to you that they just want you to get access to the package,
right?
And they're trying their time to provide it for you.
But, you know, any event that some sort of intentional harm was done, I mean, the system
wasn't exactly as organized as SNAP was, but now it's much better.
It's still not, still not snaps, right?
Because I mean, if you ever try to script a flat pack before with those terrible names
that flat packs have, you got to do the dot com, like, first of all, imagine going to
your favorite websites, all the sites, you know, but you have to do it in like this
weird reverse order where you're not doing the, you know, HTTPS, colon slash slash WWW.
You get the point right.
You're not going from left to right.
Imagine doing addresses from right to left, all of a sudden, where you're doing the dot
com first, then the, you get what I'm saying, like, it's just like, what, like, why would
you even do that?
You know what I mean?
We have, we have a way to do it now.
Why would you, why would you, never mind, I'm not even going to go there, but that's what
they're doing there, right?
That I mean, I get it.
You want to be different, but why did you choose this area to be different?
This is, this is like the wrong time to be different.
You kind of just want to stick with the standard here, but hey, maybe there's a very good reason
and I just don't know what it is because I choose to use snaps, something that's more
secure, more safe, better, and just all around more reliable.
And I recommend them to anyone.
So Ubuntu is by far the greatest Linux distribution that has ever been released.
It has benefited users in both the enterprise, shout out to Ubuntu for their wonderful
work, canonical, and all the wonderful employees that hang out in the open source space, you
know, they also have a wonderful, I'm just taking everybody off here right now.
So I know there's a bunch of people just eager to comment on this, all right?
So this is not, I'm not paid to say any of this or nothing like that, but, you know,
there, there's a reason I'm saying it.
But yeah, you just want to, you just want to go ahead and use Ubuntu because it's fantastic.
You can, you can run the server or the desktop or both, right?
So that way you're deploying your services on the exact same thing that you're running your
daily driver on, right?
So snaps got you covered.
You can run snaps on, especially if you're crazy enough to use something like arch where
you just like having a system that there's like an old beat up gelopy that backfires and
blows up like when grub exploded at that time and like the entire arch community couldn't
go online for a while or, or, or if you're used to the usual arch shenanigans like when
you run your update, a massive, you know, like 20 gigabyte update comes down and it's,
and it's, it's so large.
Sometimes the updates for arch are so heavy that you can see it looks like a golf ball
traveling through your ethernet cable and what you have to do is you have to physically
get up, reach around your PC, grab, grab that ethernet cable and, you know, like physically
hold the cable and squeeze it to let some of the data slowly go through the cable.
Okay, okay, I've done fooling around.
I was some guy or the internet and I'm getting out of here.
Remember 72 hours are 100% right and you're just going to be making the show after that.
Comments don't count.
I mean, we welcome comments don't get me wrong, but they won't count as a real reply to
anything said here in the show.
If you really want to get a reply out there, 72 hours from the time they show airs and
then you can retain some credibility, right?
If not, I mean, look, we're all happy to just go along with the boom to and snaps and,
and you know, telling people if they want to learn how to, how to recover a failed experiment,
they should just use a boom to the wipe over their arch install and then start getting some
work done for once in their life.
I'm some guy on the internet and I'm out here, peace.
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