Snap on Fedora

Installing closed-source software from third parties always is a bit cumbersome on Linux. The distributions have their systems, but other vendors just throw DEB packages over the fence. I had used Flatpak for a while, but now I've started to use Snap as well and am delighted.

If a package isn't available in a distribution, one usually is out of luck. Vendors often supply some arcane installer or an archive to unpack somewhere. Sometimes one has a PPA for Ubuntu, but on Fedora I am out of luck there as well. Flatpak offered a nice way to install other software because vendors could just upload it to Flathub. Snap solves the same problem, but predominantly for Ubuntu. Since I am on Fedora, I took a look into Flatpak only and didn't consider Snap.

Take for instance Spotify. On their download website they offer a Snap and a Debian/Ubuntu package repository. I dislike third party repositories as they can potentially overwrite all system packages and are a security risk. On Fedora, neither helped me. There is a Flatpak offering which (at least initially) is an independent repackaging of the Snap to Flatpak. It wasn't official when I first installed it, and I am not sure it is official now. If it was, then Spotify would likely link to it on their download page. So effectively I have been using an unofficial version of it, which could have injected malware in it.

The other thing that I grew annoyed of with Flatpak was their overly restrictive permission settings, which one could not even weaken on demand. Installing an IDE with Flatpak just doesn't work sensibly, as I have wrote in my article about VS Code and PyCharm.

So eventually I wanted to try out Snap. It is easy to install on Fedora, just sudo dnf install snapd. Then I could install some packages with sudo snap install …. They have Spotify, but they also have sensible versions of IDEs. On my work laptop I just installed CLion via Snap Classic and could use the whole system files without having to maintain an installation somewhere in my home directory. The same works with VS Code and other applications.

Some applications, like Obsidian, are only available on Flatpak but not on Snap. I don't care any more, I just live with having RPM, Flatpak and Snap on my system. These are three program management softwares, but I can deal with them. It makes it easer than having to maintain ad-hoc installations on my system.

So although Snap isn't built for Fedora, it works well there. I'm happy to have it now, and I'm glad that both new package systems work on multiple distributions. This lets me keep Fedora and still participate in the Ubuntu ecosystem of applications.