DISCLAIMER: this issue is a tentative plan. This issue will be updated as we hash out the details.

The maintenance of the (almost 60) AppArmor patches adds a significant maintenance burden for our kernels. These patches are only needed for strict confinement of Snaps.

To decrease the maintenance burden we should drop support for Snaps and move users over to Flatpak, seeing as 1) there is little progress on upstreaming the patches, 2) Flatpak seems to have won the battle for the desktop and 3) there is (in my opinion) no value in only supporting unconfined Snaps.

My proposal is as follows:

1. Create a plan (this issue) ✔️ .
2. Enable the migration and improve the QoL around Flatpaks:
   • unsnap #323
   • host-spawn #322
   • flatpak: Add systemd services for automatic updates solus-packages/flatpak#1
   • ?
3. Create migration documentation
   • Initially in this issue.
   • Followed by an article on the help center.
4. Let staff and developers try the migration and gather feedback.
   • Find issues in the migration documentation and fix them.
   • Are there any packages that are missing? (eg: bitwarden-cli #324)
5. Determine two cut-off dates:
   • Before 2024-07-01 users can voluntarily switch while Snap is fully maintained. After this date the AppArmor patches will be dropped and snaps can only be used without strict confinement.
   • After 2025-01-01 snap will be completely deprecated.
6. Communicate this to users via:
   • Socials/Forum.
   • Warning on the snap command.
   • Notification when running GUI snaps.