Fedora 31 will disable the Snap plugin from GNOME software

An engineer for Red Hat, Richard Hughes recently posted a message on the developer mailing list: “In Fedora 31 I’ll be disabling the snap plugin from GNOME Software.” However, Fedora’s Snap package maintainer Neal Gompa said that the decision made him shocked and puzzled. So why does Fedora make this decision?

In the announcement, Richard expressed concern about the quality of the code and said that the decision was made mainly considering the various QA issues that exist in the plug-in, the impact on the user experience, and the practicality in the long run. In addition, Hughes also revealed:

“Recently Canonical decided that they are not going to be installing gnome-software in the next LTS, preferring instead to ship a “Snap Store by Canonical” rather than GNOME Software. The new Snap store will obviously not support Flatpaks (or packages, or even firmware updates for that matter). The developers currently assigned to work on gnome-software have been reassigned to work on Snap Store, and I’m not confident they’ll be able to keep both the old and new codebases in the air at the same time.”

Although this decision seems to be a huge change, there are actually very few Fedora users affected. Because Fedora does not have the default enabled and included gnome-software-plugin-snap packages. Therefore, this does not affect the installation of Snap apps on Fedora.