For years, many Ubuntu users have felt that traditional .deb packages were being gradually sidelined in favor of the Snap ecosystem.
It started quietly. Double-clicking a downloaded .deb file would open it in Archive Manager instead of the installer. Then came controversial changes. Apps like Chromium, Thunderbolt and Firefox began defaulting to Snap packages, even when users tried installing them via the apt command in the terminal.
It continued further as Ubuntu introduced its new Snap Store. In Ubuntu 24.04, it ignored .deb packages completely. Double-clicking a .deb file would open the App Center, but wouldn’t actually install the package and just hang there. That behavior was later reverted after I highlighted it through It’s FOSS.
is this an Ubuntu problem that I’m too Kubuntu to understand?
Does Kubuntu not use snaps? One would think that packaging works the same across Ubuntu flavors.
Kubuntu uses Discover instead of the Ubuntu App Center
It’s really easy to avoid Snaps
It’s also really easy to avoid the company that made the slow, proprietary, corporate-owned Snaps default as a slap-in-face to the open-source community they depend on.
Discover has long had integrated Deb, snap, and flatpak integration. Oh, and fwupd too.
Is that supposed to be good? I prefer snaps unintegrated with my debs. This very post is about how Ubuntu integrated them too eagerly.
They are talking about how discover has backends for flatpak, snaps, deb, and fwupd. not that they are together in the Ubuntu sense or other, just that they can be managed in the same application. Therefore snaps in discover are completely optional
Ah, okay, sounds similar to Mint’s ‘Software Manager’.