snapcraft VS snapcraft.io

Back in the day, I used snapd, which is similar to Mac's Homebrew.

Hopping from one distro to another with a different package manager might require some time to adapt. Using a package manager that can be installed on most distro is one way to help you get to work faster. Flatpak is one of them; other alternative are Snap, Nix or Homebrew. Flatpak is a good starter, and if you have a bunch of free time, I suggest trying Nix.

My personal favourite IDE for java is Intellej Idea. Apart from not demanding the extra extension, It was designed special for Java and Java related languages so it runs java smoothly with great compilation time. so lets install it. Make sure you have snap before installing it

Linux Mints App Store is full of GUI programs, Snap Store ist full of it, Flathub is full of it.

You are being lazy. But I recommend bringing your ass directly to snapcraft.io and reading those documents in the Learn section!!

https://github.com/snapcore/snapcraft - not sure, but looks like a building tools for snaps

Besides, there may be other ways to install them, although there doesn't seem no such Flatpak packages in Flathub. For example, some senerio to use some release channel or Docker / Podman. Additionally, when you use a different Linux distro where systemd is adopted and therefore can do Snaps (Snapd), you have another possibility.

https://github.com/canonical/snapcraft.io please, stop spreading misinformation about snaps...

Don't like the "proprietarity" of snapcraft? OK, discard it and put flatpak. It will never be banned by Ubuntu. And yes, snapcraft.io available on github.

Probably not, since a feature request for this has been open since 2018.

snapcraft.io - the frontend website, is open source - https://github.com/canonical/snapcraft.io

What is the server code other than "something that distributes a .snap file"? Given that I can, if I want, take a .snap file to an airgapped machine and install it, it appears pretty trivial to offer alternatives to Canonical's infrastructure if anyone were particularly interested.

Snap store - aka snapcraft.io is already open-sourced under GPLv3., see here. Perhaps, you mean not that the code is closed-source but that Canonical won't relinquish any control to the community and will continue to enforce the snap ecosystem as an Apple-style walled-garden? If so, then I completely agree with that assessment. That IMHO is the core of what makes snap an inferior choice for the community.

snapcraft.io (e.g. snap store) has commits going back to Aug 16, 2017. Repo has GPLv3 license.

IMO this is mostly due to higher-ups at Canonical no longer giving a fuck about desktop, less so for the boots on the ground. Wimpress and Pope both left Ubuntu and I don't remember which one said it but one of the 2 had a tweet basically saying as much. But even without that, snaps have been around since at least Dec 11, 2014 and likely even earlier than that. But despite being around for over 8 years, there's still a bunch of common complaints and probably about 30-40% don't sound like they'd take a big company more than 6-12 months to address if they actually worked on it. Things like submitting a patch to the util-linux project to make cli tools like mount/blkid/lsblk/fdisk to make loop devices not be displayed by default (after all they effectively only "break" when snap is installed), following normal dot-prefix conventions in the $HOME folder, adding 1st party support for 3rd party repos (given the nature of FOSS, couldn't they even borrow the logic from flatpak?), adding optimizations to consume less disk space in the majority of scenarios. (I would say to also make snapcraft.io open-source, but after seeing this repo, it appears that common complaint may be off-base)