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Off topic but: it's always fascinating to see the two sides of the Linux community.

The ones who are here because: it's just works™ and don't mind proprietary stuff etc.
And the ones who are here mainly because of political/societal reasons: Free software etc.

You can say "I'm here because of both", but in the end I always see people tend to one or the other...

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A worthy addition to my library (finally). Hopefully we'll see Doom Eternal much sooner.

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You can absolutely remove/change/add as many repos as you want to your snapd config

Could you link the documentation for this, I'm not able to find it.

This "The Register" article from 18 months ago talks about how to set up your own "snap store". Still don't know why you'd do that, but there you go. https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/10/snap_without_ubuntu_tools/

Except, it doesn't. It explains how you can install .snaps with snap, book your store with Canonical and mentions a wondrous open source store which just shows it's not designed to do so:

lol is a variant of snap with support for a custom snap server. It's in beta, but you can daily-drive it. We'll be making it easier to publish snaps and be adding support for multiple repos.

It's a script that downloads .snap files (with curl because apparently snap can't even do that) and installs them via "snap install --dangerous".

Snap is simply not designed for repositories.

https://canonical.com/blog/howto-host-your-own-snap-store

It's a very old blog post from Canonical.

Exactly, it so old that it's no longer valid.

snapstore was a minimalist example of a "store" for snaps, but is not compatible with the current snapd implementation. As a result I have removed the contents here to avoid further confusion.

https://github.com/canonical/snapcraft/commits/main/snapcraft/store
Canonical developers actively maintain the store backend. Not sure what else you expect from them.

Snapcraft is the command-line build tool for packaging and distributing software and apps in the snap container format.

That is not the store backend.

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"Let's hope they will finally add the native Linux version to GOG now."

I hope too, but I'm not very confident when I read this:

https://www.gog.com/forum/drive_rally/drive_rally_changelog/post9

"GoG had issues with updating our product page on time. At the moment Linux version is delisted from GOG because of GoG Galaxy launcher combability issues. Sorry for the inconvenience."

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Only took them 9 years, lol. But nice that it came out DRM-free.

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It did it to me today. Easy fix if you know what you're doing, but that's probably not everyone.

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I consider your “OK” to be equal to my “not impressive”.

And I know about isthereanydeal

The third thing to consider is mentioned at the top of the article. The GOG version has no multiplayer and also no SnapMap.

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2. Considering how old the game is and how many times it has been bundled (e.g. on Fanatical) and highly discounted the current price is not impressive.

Looking at IsThereAnyDeal [1], the lowest discount price was €2, but mostly around €3.5 during the last year. And none of that was DRM-free. So I think the current GOG price is quite OK given the bonus offered (the DRM-free version). People who don't care about DRM probably already have it anyway.

[1] https://isthereanydeal.com/game/doom/history/#price-chart:detail

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Since aur has been mentioned several times: The main page of the aur states in bold font

DISCLAIMER: AUR packages are user produced content. Any use of the provided files is at your own risk.

I'm not sure what the other documentation (e.g. the wiki) states at the current time, but when I last checked which is probably two digit number of years ago – it explicitly told you to check the PKGBUILD files.

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(Somehow I still got a notification for the reply even though I unsubscribed from the comment thread. Hmm...)

Snap Store is open source. Literally and any other ways. Where you host it then, is another matter. You can host your own store with snaps.

All I've claimed is that the code for the backend is not available. The snapcraft.io website code isn't it. And I personally consider the backend an integral part of the Ubuntu Snap Store.

Whether or not it is possible to host your own snap packages is irrelevant to what I said.

As you suggest "do you trust Canonical"

No, all I said is "Whether or not you trust Canonical is up to you, obviously" in reply to Scaine bringing up the issue of trust.

well, do you or those concerned in this argument trust the server holders of the common websites you seldom visit? Right.

No, I don't trust most of them. Again, how is this relevant? (I do trust Liam though. )


Just to make this absolutely clear, I never even hinted that someone should not use Ubuntu or Snap. Maybe you're confusing me with someone else? I might occasionally make the mistake of discussing a technical detail or (like in this case) a licensing/transparency decision, but I don't take part in pointless distro wars in general. I like that there's something for everyone. Please stop trying to drag me into an argument.

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Wow, that's pretty major! I would have just thought that a bug like that in beta would have been fixed for sure. I suppose not enough people reported it like you said or the reports were just overlooked. I know in my work, if one person reports something I ignore it, if a few people report something, I look into it, if a lot of people report something, EVERYONE looks into it. So in this case, it may just not have been enough reports to deem it worthy?

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Btw. if anyone else is wondering which of the games features the sewing machine gun – it's Fashion Police Squad.

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Two things come to my mind:

1. The way they treated the composer – although there are (obviously) conflicting reports trying to redirect blame – I tend to believe his very long writeup of the development process of the sequel. If I were to ignore that then there is still…
2. Considering how old the game is and how many times it has been bundled (e.g. on Fanatical) and highly discounted the current price is not impressive.

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Let's hope they will finally add the native Linux version to GOG now.

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For shame, Liam!!

I always assumed Simon was part of Canonical. Such a big community around all this, I'm kind of surprised something like this doesn't happen more often. Test, test and test again, I suppose.

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@tuubi

https://canonical.com/blog/howto-host-your-own-snap-store

It's a very old blog post from Canonical.

https://github.com/canonical/snapcraft/commits/main/snapcraft/store
Canonical developers actively maintain the store backend. Not sure what else you expect from them.

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As Tuxee notes, Prime Gaming just gives you keys to other stores, mainly, although they do run their own "store". I have 140 games on GOG now, probably 130+ of those are thanks to Prime Gaming.

You're kind of right with some of the other stores though. Epic keys, Prime keys and Microsoft Store keys might be revoked... who knows? Is it likely? Nope. Are you paying for it? Kind of - I mean, you are paying for Prime, but your £9/month is probably for other reasons. I pay it for free delivery on Amazon, although I'm rethinking these days as I'm massively reducing how much I spend there. Other people might be paying for the TV shows, or the music sub. They throw every service at you for that £9/month, so it's not like you lose out particularly by trying more services.

Then there's Luna, but I've not tried that, and it's not part of Prime. I don't like cloud-streaming gaming services.

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@Tuubi, no I didn't see that "Properietary (backend)" bit, because I clicked on the "Snap Store" link in the table of contents, and when you do that, you're taken (confusingly) to another box-out that claims it's GPL3. Not a great article, tbh!

As others have said, yes, it seems likely that the store itself is still proprietary software, but as others have said, you can absolutely remove/change/add as many repos as you want to your snapd config, exactly as you can with Flatpak. But no-one will because, like flatpak, it's convenient to just use the store where everything is hosted. For snaps, that's Canonical's (proprietary) server, and for Flatpak, that's (open-source) Flathub.

This "The Register" article from 18 months ago talks about how to set up your own "snap store". Still don't know why you'd do that, but there you go. https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/10/snap_without_ubuntu_tools/

I don't get the attitude to the fact that the store is proprietary. If you use Steam, you trust valve. If you use Github, you trust Microsoft. If you use AUR, you trust... a community of random internet geeks!

And sure, if you run Ubuntu, or try out snaps on another distro, you trust Canonical. But for some reason, this leaves folks pretty outraged.

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@Tuubi

You also say: (Snap Store) "Which doesn't do anything useful without the proprietary backend."

Where do you base this claim? You can take the open source Snap Store and make it do everything you find useful yourself on your own server back, can you not.

Usefulness therefore might be seen coming from the actual content of that independent server.

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@Tuubi

Snap Store is open source. Literally and any other ways. Where you host it then, is another matter. You can host your own store with snaps.

As you suggest "do you trust Canonical", well, do you or those concerned in this argument trust the server holders of the common websites you seldom visit? Right.

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Fedora has a built-in Steam repo. You just need to enable it. Why would you use the flatpack? Due to flatpack adding a "obfuscation" / "security" layer they will have wierd issues when really needing to talk to your hardware. Sure, for wierd 3rd party programs it's one thing, but I wouldn't use them for something as driver dependent as Steam with Proton and the games. Same for NVIDIA drivers. Just enable the RPM fusion repo that's included with the install and just install the driver.

https://itsfoss.com/install-nvidia-drivers-fedora/

note: that's for GNOME. KDE should have similar or just edit /etc/yum/repos.d/rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver.repo and rpmfusion-nonfree-steam.repo and change "enabled=0" to "enabled=1"

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Like you can do with Flathub, but which no-one actually does, because FlatHub is convenient.

It's quite common for nightly builds to be distributed as self-contained `.flatpak` files, as Flathub does not allow uploading nightly builds to it.

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I didn't know Steve Langasek, and even though it was a while ago, it's still sad to hear of a loss like this. Rest in Peace.

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Need 3dmark to join now, I did read they was doing but that never seem to arrive!

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Looks like a sewing machine…

Specifically one of the early 1900s Singer Sphinx models. But definitely also a submachine gun of some sort.

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They said "everything else you run", so there's no contradiction between what you both are saying.

You're right, he probably only means the Snap Store client. Which doesn't do anything useful without the proprietary backend.

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I downloaded it and tried it, it just shows a splash screen... eventually after a few minutes I had to hard kill it.
Doesn't look like it did anything, as the process was pretty much just idle.

I tried again, but nope. I would like to get feedback as to what it's trying to do, so I can help if need be, but this is just too abstract to work with.

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Nice!

Can't wait to see my favorite YouTubers present benchmarks from Linux from now on too 👌😎

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Looks like a sewing machine…

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@dziadulewicz

So the server back end is proprietary, as most websites server that people visit are.
Snap Store, snapd, AppArmor and everything else you run (in means of snaps) are completely open source.

No, that literally doesn't make Snap Store completely open source.

They said "everything else you run", so there's no contradiction between what you both are saying.

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