Their insistence on Snap over Flatpak is just confusing the ecosystem, not helping it. I get it's a lock-in thing for them (Snap is locked to Canonical's proprietary store and only allows Ubuntu runtimes) but that's a harmful thing to do.
I don't per se mind using snaps instead of flatpaks (though I do prefer the latter). What bothers me is that Canonical replaced Firefox in their apt repos with a fake package that installs the snap version of the app. If I choose to install via apt, it's because I want the standard version of the app, and I don't appreciate bait and switch nonsense trying to push snap usage. That was when I lost interest in using Ubuntu, I don't want my OS trying to override my decisions.
I know a lot of people who refuse to use Ubuntu outright specifically and solely because of snaps and how awful they are. Our developer laptops at work are meant to be running Ubuntu and I have some coworkers who only begrudgingly switched over after discovering how to prevent the 'fake snap firefox' package from being installed[0].
I get what they're going for - a way to ship self-contained (usually end-user-facing) applications with any dependencies they need without any risk of breaking other applications in the system. Unfortunately, it just results in breaking those applications specifically instead, in weird and stupid ways that are difficult to debug.
I think if snaps did the Flatpak thing - extract to a local directory instead of living on squashfs forever, or even storing them as an uncompressed disk image instead of squashfs - it might be more reasonable, but at that point you may as well just use Flatpaks like everyone else wants.
[0] - Add the following to `/etc/apt/preferences.d/no-ubuntu-firefox`:
This will make any `firefox` package from any repository with the `Ubuntu` label (i.e. an official Ubuntu repository) have a -1 priority, or 'never install ever'.
I switched away from (K)ubuntu over this. I have no major beef with Snaps, I see the benefit of a containerised app distribution system, but hijacking apt by squatting on popular packages to promote your store is completely unacceptable.
Trust is so hard won and so easily lost. If I can't trust `apt install firefox` to do what it says on the tin, how can I trust anything else in the repository? Maybe next year Canonical decides to replace systemd with one that includes includes freemium access to helpful AI services from Canonical?
Yeah I think it's just a way to try and extract some money from the ecosystem.
But many people will never pay for Linux and it's even causing people to move away (eg to Mint which removes snap)
Perhaps it makes sense in the enterprise market though. They're always trying to push launchpad to us at work and I'm sure this will integrate with snap. But launchpad doesn't work for us because it only works with Ubuntu. So it's just a non starter for us, we have more distros to support. Sure Ubuntu is the biggest in our environment but we want a single pane of glass for everything. More similarities between distros would make that a lot easier.
The business model of these distro vendors is to use their free versions of their distros to get the public to beta test their broken software so that when the bugs are worked out, they can release it for their paid-support customers in a good state.
That, and in case of snap, is to create artifical market share for their proprietary and paid solutions by preinstalling it on the free version.
Apps are so messy on Linux. I get some software from apt, flatpak, snap, appimage files, and pip. I wish that at least about 3 of these delivery systems would get merged and depreciated. It was honestly easier to figure this stuff out when it was just .deb files and nothing else.
Pip is not Linux specific, it's the same on Win/Mac. I prefer AppImages because they are just statically compiled binaries. I prefer Apt&friends because it is good old packaging. But flatpak and snap? Hell no. I see so little advantage there.
It's because Microsoft hasn't been inspiring confidence when their five year old Xbox Series X is more expensive than last year's better performing PS5 Pro - which runs an increasing library of Microsoft's own games at better resolutions and framerates. Microsoft didn't even have a Black Friday discount for their hardware this year.
That's not the playbook of a company actively invested in a market.
It was an "online service", basically a dedicated client and a curated experience before the internet and web standardized things.
When you logged in, you'd get a "Welcome" screen with news, if you had any mail, etc. Most of AOL was organized into "Channels" which were different sections focused on things like Sports or Kids.
You could jump to a channel with a keyword, somewhat like a URL.
The channels looked somewhat like hypercard decks. Everything was designed to load fast on a slow modem and assets were shipped with the client, typically on floppy or CD. Occasionally a channel would download an "art pack" which could take 5-10 minutes, but this was rare.
After AOL 2.6 or so it had internet functionality and became an ISP. You still needed to use the AOL software to dial in (it didn't use PPP like others) but otherwise it worked fine.
It was the easiest "one of those" at the time, competing with CompuServe and Prodigy. Apple had a rebranded AOL briefly called eWorld.
It blows my mind that on Linux I can pin the taskbar to the left side and it works out of the box. Windows, aside from somehow losing that basic functionality, won't even install because it requires an internet connection and doesn't even have drivers to use my wifi or Ethernet that the installer can use.
How did this happen? How did Linux, of all things, become easier?
I just don't know what's going on there anymore. Every update is a technical and a PR disaster.
There is no rhyme or reason to Windows UI anymore. I thought I was drinking too much when trying to network my Windows file server with a Mac, and running into the same settings in what looked like three different themed-UIs.
Right-click menu? Would you like more options? Here they are, in what looks like a 2005 version of Windows. What is this?
Don't get me started on AI. Their new Quick Recovery feature was basically not tested and forced me to re-install:
You know what that did? Today I removed Steam from my Windows partition. I am gaming on Mint now. Imagine being so bad at YOUR ONE JOB that even gaming, the ultimate Microsoft forte, is being eaten away at.
Because they don't have a vision for the entire OS apart from sticking a copilot button in every app. Current windows has so many features that I am sure even current MS employees have little idea about, and because of that, have been rewritten many times over. Sometimes I wonder if they even have any idea about what's going on in registries or how are you supposed to figure out certain policies in hybrid mode - between defender/intune and GPOs. Good luck figuring out windows hello vs convenience pin, or when defender goes haywire and starts blocking stuff etc etc.
In windows you have 5 versions of apps for each era of windows, in m365 you have 5 different dashboards showing same information just a little bit differently so you have to know all of them if you need info A and B.
But at least in admin.microsoft you have Copilot and Agents above Users and Groups, because ef'in up your muscle memory is important ...
Valve is actually extremely small, I've heard estimates at around 350-400 people.
They're also a flat organization, with all the good and bad that brings, so scaling with contractors is easier than bringing on employees that might want to work on something else instead.
300 is extremely small for a company of their size in terms of revenue and impact. Linus media group and their other companies for instance is over 100 people, and is much smaller in impact and revenue than a company like valve, despite not being far off the number of employers (within an order of magnitude)...
Of course smaller companies exist — there are 1 person companies! But in a world where many tech companies have 50,000+ employees, 300 is much closer to 100 or 10 and they can all be considered small.
And then you consider it in context: a company with huge impact, brand recognition, and revenue (about $50M/employee in 2025). They’ve remained extremely small compared to how big they could grow.
There are not many tech companies with 50k+ employees, as a point of fact.
I’m not arguing just to argue - 300 people isn’t small by any measure. It’s absolutely not “extremely small” as was claimed. It’s not relatively small, it’s not “small for what they are doing”, it’s just not small at all.
300 people is a large company. The fact that a very small number of ultrahuge companies exist doesn’t change that.
For context, 300 people is substantially larger than the median company headcount in Germany, which is the largest economy in the EU.
You certainly seem to be arguing just to argue. You’re comparing Valve to the companies you choose to work for or the median German company, but those are irrelevant. You’re using the wrong reference set.
Valve is a global, revenue-dominant, platform-level technology company. In its category, 300 employees is extremely small.
Valve is not a German company, so that’s an odd context, but if you want to use Germany for reference, here are the five German companies with the closest revenue to Valve’s:
Would you say a country of 300 people isn't small?
Big, small, etc. are relative terms. There is no way to decide whether or not 300 is small without implicitly saying what it's small relative to. In context, it was obvious that the point being made was "valve is too small to have direct employees working on things other than the core business"
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