> When both snapd and apt sources are available, which one should I choose
> for package installation? Though I found the package versions in snapd are
> a bit newer than apt.
Snap and friends are technologies which make it easy to package an
application without having to pay attention to how it interacts with
other things installed on the system (since it's confined in a kind of
lightweight virtual machine).
So if the Snap version of the package is older than the APT version,
it's a pretty strong sign that something's amiss with the Snap package.
If you want your application to be nicely integrated into the rest of
the system, the APT version is probably the better choice.
Same thing if you care about the difference between `main` and
`non-free` since it's much easier to make a Snap package which includes
not-really-Free libraries.
Same thing if you want your application to be automatically kept up-to-date
w.r.t. security issues.
Where Snap and friends shine is when the application is too hard to
package up sanely for Debian, in which case either it's not included in
Debian at all, or only in a very old version and it's on the verge of
being dropped from Debian because upstream is making it too hard.
Typically, these are services/applications written in things like
node.js or Go, where it's common practice to use "vendoring" and to have
dependencies that require "the one and only compatible version"
of libraries. Often just tracking down all the dependencies and their
respective licenses is tiresome (and has to be redone on a regular basis).
:-(
Compared to things like PPAs, Snaps tend to be less likely to mess up
your OS.
Stefan
