Canonical are currently dealing with a security incident with the Snap store, after users noticed multiple fake apps were uploaded so temporary limits have been put in place.
Cause we all needed another reason to not use snaps
I stopped using the Snap Store the moment I realized the majority of the Snaps were uploaded by totally random people who have zero relationship with the app itself.
For example: https://snapcraft.io/publisher/kz6fittycent
You’re telling me this guy is personally involved with all 43 snaps he’s published? You want me to believe he’s going to dutifully maintain all 43 of them?
Yeah. Okay. Sure. Totally.
It’s like, there’s a man on the street corner selling chicken nuggets he swears he got from McDonalds. Do you want to buy nuggets from him or just walk around the corner and get them from McDonalds yourself?
I dislike the snap store as well, but what you describe is how packaging works on Debian as well. Anyone can make, maintain a package. And there are people there that maintain even more packages.
However, there is a difference when uploading it to the repos, you either have to be a Debian developer or find one to sponsor your package first. After a while of doing good work, you can also request becoming one yourself.
This additional burden makes it more difficult for malicious people to go through.
Personally I prefer this separation of software developer and package maintainer, because that makes it a bit more difficult for malicious devs to push packages directly or for them to not package them the optimal way for the distro.
I think that in practice it prevents them completely, i never heard of any type malware uploaded to debian or nix and flathub for that matter.
I guess its a reminder to verify your apps
Isn’t it the same for Flatpak?
Somewhat but its not nearly as bad
It doesn’t seem to be an issue on flatpak but idk if they’re doing anything in particular to stop this
At those times I’m glad that I ditched Ubuntu for Mint. Less stupid shit to deal with. (That was partially motivated by snaps. I’ve seen bored snails in alcoholic stupor running faster than snaps.)
As someone who’s daily driven more than a dozen distros over the past 18 years or so, I used to always go back to Ubuntu because “it just works” and I’ve never had it break from a standard update, unlike Manjaro and (once or twice) Arch. Once the Snap store started being actively pushed, e.g. the Firefox apt package just being an alias for the snap, I jumped ship to Mint permanently for all of my main PCs. Well, also Armbian for my ARM mini PCs, and Asahi for the Mac mini, but yeah.
Fuck Snap and especially fuck the snap store
The move to Snap was a mistake from the Ubuntu team.
Ah snap!
I find the shitting on Snap technology itself unreasonable. I left Ubuntu LTS for Debian Stable partly due to Snaps (and Debian is supreme distro), but the technology itself has a massive advantage over Flatpak if it became more adopted – system integration.
Malicious actors being able to upload Snaps and them being less vetted is moreso a weakness of FOSS infrastructure underfunding, and not because “snap bad”.
Big issue with snaps for me has always been the proprietary backend and that they try to make a new standard instead of improving flatpak which most distros have alrady adopted
Canonical loves reinventing the wheel instead of using and improving something that already exists. It’s also either source-available (not OSS, as no contributions are possible) or closed-source. Examples are Mir (Wayland), Snaps (flatpak) and Unity (GNOME 3).
Unity wasn’t FOSS? And they tried to make a non-FOSS window manager as well?
