I've been using Ubuntu for years and I literally had no idea. Admittedly, I don't deal with servers or anything, so I guess some of the stuff coming from their package respositories could be "snap" format and I wouldn't really notice.
Actually yes, this is exactly the case. And they've done it in a really shady way if you ask me (or Clem, the main guy over at Linux Mint).
I've been using Fedora on a little tablet I've got, and it uses either .rpm packages or flatpaks. The GUI package manager lets you select which repository it pulls from (either .rpm, or Flapaks can come from Flathub or their own repo, and clearly displays this). If invoked from the terminal, the DNF package manager gets you .rpms, and Flatpak gets you, well, flatpaks.
Ubuntu uses the APT package manager with .deb packages, and Snap with snap packages. But sometimes if you do an apt-get install, it installs a snap instead. That's some Microsoft level bullshit.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !angryupvote
I know we all like to hate on canonical for literally any reason, but this happens with every single software repository that is not a closed garden and some that are.
And yeah, it's sandboxed, so the damage is far, far less than it could be.
Sandboxing does nothing for social-engineering attacks, which is what many of the malicious snaps were designed for.
And the thing that makes the Snap Store uniquely bad is that there's no human review. Anyone can throw up a malicious snap, and there are very good odds that it'll get served there. Even the Flathub, a community-run project, has human reviews before new apps get published. Canonical, despite having money and resources that community projects don't, can't seem to be bothered to take basic steps to protect their users.
Canonical is a profitable corporation trying to convince people to use their actual closed garden software repository but they can't even be bothered to do even the most basic of sanity checks to prevent obvious scams from appearing on their store. Stop making excuses for them.
