Former Canonical Developer is Working on a Script that Replaces Snaps with Flatpaks

Linux magazine reports that "Former Snap co-developer Alan Pope, who left Canonical in 2021 after 10 years with the company, has developed unsnap, a script that replaces snaps with Flatpaks where available. The script, hosted on GitHub, has been tested by the developers for use on Ubuntu and all derivatives that offer snapd and packages in the Snap format." Pope clarifies its status on GitHub:Let's say it's "Pre-alpha", as in "It kinda works on my computer". Unless you plan on contributing (see below) it's probably not ready for you, yet. And Pope notes the existence of "related projects" like the custom-desktop project by Natan Junges "which provides a set of packages to revert an existing Ubuntu install back to something many users may appreciate more." And "deb-get enables Ubuntu users to install and update deb-based packages of popular applications" But Linux magazine tested out unsnap:The flatpak list command can be used to determine which snaps were converted to Flatpak format. For snaps with a Flatpak equivalent, unsnap converted these snaps cleanly, and all of the programs remained functional. The script left the remaining snaps and the infrastructure untouched... An equivalent Flatpak must be available, which is very often the case with graphical applications. With a little manual work, the Snap infrastructure can also be removed.

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