 All right, I have a conspiracy theory. I need to get off my chest. It's a Linux based conspiracy theory I've it's actually been eating at my soul for several months. I just need to get it out there Maybe someone else will will agree with me on this. Okay, but it's driving me crazy. Okay It makes me feel like I'm from an alternate universe in fact that might actually be what it is it might be You know the Mandela effect, you know, this supposed to be the oh, I remember Nelson Mandela dying in jail Oh, I don't remember C3PO has a silver leg. Oh, blah blah blah and therefore you conclude you must be from an alternate universe That's how I feel. Okay, I feel like I must be from an alternate universe. Here is my conspiracy theory, okay? These things app images snaps flat packs. I was born in a universe where these things did not exist Okay, allegedly in this universe. They are supposed to have been around for years And I don't know they're very common In fact, I looked up and looked it up and there are like people doing videos on them years ago but I had never heard of any of these things until only a couple months ago and Theoretically me is a famous you Linux content creator. I would have run across these Eventually at some point. Okay, even if I wasn't using them in this video I want to talk about these and why I don't use them. Okay, because I Think there I don't want to live in this universe. Let me put it that way. I think these things are terrible I've mentioned some of the reasons I don't like them But I want to I want to make it a little bit more complete and I'm gonna hope that I get it all in this one Session. Okay, so here's the deal. What are app images snaps and flat packs? If you don't know just turn off the video You're in for a world of hurt because these things are terrible. They'll make your life miserable. They're nothing but frustration Okay, but what they are supposed to be our universal package managers for Linux so It suffered there exactly the opposite of that Okay, let's first let's think about the alleged problem in Linux the alleged problem because this is one of these It's it's one of these problems that like I guess noobs the Linux really fret about but once you get into it You just like don't care But the problem allegedly is that they're all there too much. I'm not gonna do it in the dumb soy dev voice I'm just gonna do it. I'm gonna respect my opponents You know, there are there's this problem that there are too many different different distributions There's too much so-called fragmentation. That is I might use Ubuntu my friend might use arch my other friend might use gintu and that means I'm gonna use app get as my package manager He's gonna use Pac-Man. He's gonna use emerge. I might have a friend that uses fedora I don't do people in the world actually exist that use fedora I don't know if that's just a internet meme, but I don't even know what fedora has when they have one of those Is it like yum? Is that it or is that so who cares who cares? But either way there are different package managers on Linux. Okay, that is the alleged problem That's an issue. Okay, because oh if I if I run arch and I have a new Ubuntu server Those are different things. So it's I don't know. Oh my brain is gonna break. You'll be fine Now this alleged solution is to use one of these things now in real life Okay, first off you should be right now you should be going to your image folder and getting that one xkcd comic that is like oh There are a hundred different standards of Linux package managers. Well, okay. We'll make another one that is universal Oh, well now there's a hundred and one standards. That's basically how it is. It's that first way way worse, okay? Because here's what happens it used to be if you were just a normie Ubuntu user You just had to worry about app get that's all you had to do You know or you might have to figure out how to use PPAs But that still is really just a part of that, you know the app get system on Ubuntu. Okay, but Now that is not the case. You have to know app get you have to know snap that comes with Ubuntu But default and everyone the on the internet is going to tell you to use flat pack or app image to install Install some kind of program the first thing that people tell you to do if something is not in the main Ubuntu app to get Repositories they're gonna tell you oh just I'll just use flat pack. I'll just use app image. That's now so now what happens is instead of The way it used to be where at least individual end users had one package manager They had to worry about now they might have four now They might have way more frustration and of course that means pulling redundant dependencies that means, you know Thanks messing up. Thanks not being compatible stuff like this nothing but frustration now There are alleged benefits to this. Oh actually all right. Let me I pulled this page up I pulled this github. Let me explain what this is. This is when I first came on to the snap and flat pack Mandela effect universe this guy opened an issue a github issue and he's like I installed snap Why am I doing in the voice who cares I installed snap blah blah blah basically stuff broke actually That's a common that's a common theme whenever you're dealing with any of these package managers everything's gonna break everything around them It's gonna break none of it is gonna be compatible. Everything's just it's gonna be frustration Okay, but anyway, he's having font problems, and I was like what is snap I don't I don't know what this is and if put yourself in the shoes of someone like me who would literally never heard this term He says this I just remember like being flabbergasted when I read this like what is this guy talking about? He says snaps as in Linux packages format from snap craft I installed snappy, and then I went to install some snap packages from the snappy store, and I was just like I've never heard I forget what I actually said here. I said something like oh, yeah, it sounds like it comes from like a doctor Seuss dimension. Yeah, it's like oh wow my snappy full snap fools from you know snapopolis That's what it sounds like. It's so weird But anyway, what was what was I gonna say I was gonna say something important Okay, so the real issue is there's an alleged benefit that these things are supposed to give And that is well multiple alleged benefits and all of them are bad. Okay, the main thing is they are not real Package managers you are not pulling down programs with their dependencies and installing them on your system in the way that Appget or Pac-Man or emerge or any other Linux package manager does that's not how they work They have their own they don't use the Linux the Unix file system in the typical way Instead when you install an app it pulls that app in all of its dependencies Okay, so they used to not even have dependency management So you do if you install 20 different programs that required some dependency you would have 20 different forms of that dependency I think that might I think flatpacks fix that so you don't have a million gigabytes for all your programs Um, but snap. I don't know. I don't know if snaps fix that but here's the issue. Okay, many issues with this Let's say actually actually there's a site. I think I pulled it up a second ago. So what is it flat? kill Dot org so there's this little site And they know well they note this in terms of security updates But this is actually true of any updates the issue is if you have all of these apps that have included in their own Containers they have these different dependencies. Well, what happens if there's a security flaw in one of those dependencies What happens if you need to update that for something else? Okay? Well, that means that you you know If you have snap and flat pack and all this kind of stuff installed They're not gonna be able to properly you you have different versions of a a obsolete You know program dependency that might have security for laws. They actually mentioned one here What is it with like the calculator or application or something like that? You can look at it. The other thing is a lot of people say oh, well, there's a there's a benefit to having sandblock boxed applications Because oh well, yes, they don't properly interact with anything else on the system Oh, yeah, snap and flat pack like the if they if they even succeed at reading your GTK theme to get you know your color theme or anything else external for the system. That's a miracle But even even if that's a flaw, that's no big deal because at least it's more secure But it isn't more secure. This site actually notes it very simply because Basically all of these programs have right permissions To be able to write in the user's home directory if you can do that You can do anything because you can do something as simple as oh, I'm going to echo something into the bash RC and say oh In the background download this malicious script and run it okay send all your Send all your good stuff to me so I can monitor you or something like that Okay, you know have a key log or anything anything you can do so the idea that these are more secure is just nonsensical like I think it's a good example like these are marketed like flat pack and snap are marketed to the public as if they're supposed to be easier to use when they're not you're gonna run into like crazy Problems when you're you're dealing with them because they don't interact properly with the rest of the Unix based system But they're allegedly marketed under the idea that they're made for like security reasons where I don't think that's true at all I think it's like I think it's more for the the fish the it being easier for the developers Oh, we'll just develop this and tell them all to use that for this platform. We're not gonna bother to do anything else We'll just have it pull the dependencies Automatically and we'll just manually hard code them. That's the other thing if you have you know the other issue is If you have let's say you require or different apps might require a slightly different version of a package So you have like all these different versions of a package whereas if you were just using a package manager Like Pac-Man or app get in the proper way that you're supposed to be using you don't have to have that everything you do the Maintainers just keep it up to date. That's just that it's supposed to work I've said before like one of the reasons that people use these things is not Necessarily because they're actually easier to use or at least at the beginning They see me or easier to use because then you know Ubuntu you get this nice little thing that oh well here Just click and install that and that's all that's all you have to do. It's easy. It's super easy But it's just I You know you use like an operating system like Ubuntu that's like a slower release It's not like arch, you know an arch or art X right you have you have up-to-date programs all the time And you have this massive you have the AUR where you can basically download anything Okay, you can just get steam if you really want it you can get all these proprietary Junk software that they offer on snap and flat peck and all this kind of stuff all of that stuff You can get on the AUR if you needed it But I think most of the reason that people gravitate to snaps and flat pecks is just because they use like a slow release Distribution like Ubuntu which frankly shouldn't even frankly, you know, I don't really feel like You should be running an operating system like that on your main computer You can get by with that But I really I feel like you know, it's in the same vein as Debian where it's a server operating system And it does very good at doing that sometimes But I feel like the demands nowadays There's a reason that people more like normies more like introductory Linux users are moving over to stuff like Manjaro or you know, Ardex or something like that because a lot of these Faster updating distributions you actually get the software that you want in your package managers And you don't have to worry about doing snap and flat pecks like this is where I actually think the impetus for Like, you know people using these things actually comes from I just don't feel and I'll say as someone who doesn't just You know people email me all the time having problems with snaps and flat pecks And all of it is part of a systematic issue. The systematic issue is that these do not properly Interface with your Unix based Linux operating system There is a standard like everything is supposed to be not supposed to be but I mean ideally works with the Unix philosophy programs do one thing and do it well and Importantly they can interact with other programs when you sandbox applications. That is why it's a big problem Where if oh this dependency didn't work out or it wasn't packaged correctly or it caused this kind of font problem where it You know, it doesn't look at my theme correctly all of them. It's not just It's not just one or two little things like I don't want to nitpick them saying that Oh, the depends the dependency problem, which has been solved I think on flat pack is a deal breaker for me because it's part of a bigger issue The bigger issue is going to be cropping up forever as long as these package systems exist Because the maintainers the developers they're gonna be playing whack-a-mole with these programs that all have the same source The same sources they are not they're they're not like just normal files on the computer that install like all the other Programs on any other computer. Okay, that is the issue and that is like if you want a world like that Maybe the world of Mac OS is more to your liking frankly Because I think they basically do stuff like that where they have massive applications. You can't change But you know the reality is you know this this is I think someone said yeah Someone said here right here, you know snaps are proprietary and a Trojan horse for more proprietary software RMS didn't die for this And there's a sense in which that's true like there's a lot of you know This is sort of becoming a platform And this isn't necessarily per se like gonna come with the technology But when I look at these things I see that they are mostly being used as a way to get new users of Linux to continue You do use the proprietary software they used on Windows and it's like if you're doing that, dude I mean like no shame like if you're just familiar With something you like on Windows and you're using it because you're you know how to use it And you don't know how to use Linux stuff and it looks like there's nothing out there because you don't know the the field I guess you know nothing against that, but you know what you really want is people moving to a more productive user-centric extensible I guess computing environment and I see these programs I see You know snap and flat pack as undermining this fundamentally they're turning they're good turning Linux into little iOS's that that's sort of how I see it but Anyway, that's about it. I hope that maybe gets my vision of why I find this such an issue I mean the weirdest thing to me in addition to jumping to this Mandela effect universe where these things exist is that no one No one else is really questioning them like I you know I brought up that side a second ago, which you know is negative about them But it's so rare to see anyone questioning these things and that they're taking like they they've been organized be the by these companies And are taking over Linux, okay? I at least think people should be a little bit more suspicious and I feel crazy that no one else is You know with all the security concerns with all of the frustration it causes users all the emails I get about this kind of stuff all the time like problems caused by these things I'm just confused more people are not like Adjutating against them. Okay, that's my that's all I have to say It's effort It's over like this. So Brody Brody actually has 10,000 subscribers. Congratulations He has a tenth of my subscribers, but look at this camera. It's 10 times better than mine. I need to update my equipment No, that's that's how actually what what's the resolution here, and that's on 480p Yeah, and I guess I need to get a bit of a webcam, but you know, we don't we know what we like keeping it minimal We like keeping it. I don't know just the casual on this channel. So anyway, look at all that lighting Maybe I should get that I did turn on a lamp for this video. Okay, that's it. I'll see you guys next time Watch out for these things