AnimalsDream

Speaking of things people are better without, I wish everyone would stop using Medium. There’s so many better alternatives - Write Freely, Wordpress, Ghost, just to name a few.

Came in to say this. Linux on ARM is getting so close to daily driver ready.

Mint is literally a slightly modified Ubuntu.

Or just use flatpak or Appimage.

Is the Snap backend available and open-source? If not, then it’s antithetical to software freedom because Canonical is trying to close their users into a walled garden in the ways that Apple and Google are with their app stores.

There are plenty of software packaging systems that work just as well or better than Snap, and promote software freedom (Flatpak, Appimage, or even just traditional package managers). By using and promoting Snap over these, you are working against the growth of digital rights.

It’s impossible to have a fully free system?

https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html

But more to your point, it’s a false dichotomy. Even before the latest changes to the Debian install media, for years it was maybe unintuitive but still easy enough to just choose the “nonfree” install iso. That one would automatically include all the proprietary bits that are necessary for a fully functional Linux system.

But now those nonfree parts are in the Debian install by default, so there really is just nothing that you get from Ubuntu that can’t just as easily work in Debian - especially since everyone is moving toward flatpaks, and appimages anyway.

This.

But you’re also promoting Ubuntu’s continued use, when Snaps are just one example of Canonical being antithetical to free software values. Mint is all the benefits of Ubuntu without that garbage, so why not that?

Snap should be reason enough that everyone should abandon Ubuntu, especially when Mint is right there. The last thing we need is to make Linux more like Android+Google Play.