It seems to me that Syncthing doesn’t fit well as a snap, and that snap packaging doesn’t suit Syncthing well. The uptake is also low compared to other packaging formats. All in all it seems like we might save some effort and grief in no longer supporting it. Yes? No?
Mainly the sand boxing is confusing, and the config/database storage is unusual. We don’t seem to gain any real advantages from the packaging.
Yes
Agreed too.
I’ve sort of soft deprecated it for now – removed it from search, and added deprecation notices:
I’ll release 1.4.1 for it tomorrow regardless, and then maybe let it stay at that…
I do not know what makes snap and syncthing not fit well, but I really do appreciate having the snap. A fresh install is just a quick snap install syncthing away to being all set up and current. Personally I love the snap, it is dead simple to install and is/was always up-to-date. I installed the snap because it was so quick and easy, I didn’t have to hunt for instructions, question what was I copy/pasting. I really hope it is not discontinued (selfishly because I do not know what struggles you have with it - I just randomly came across the discontinuation note in my software store). I love this software, been using this since a bit before the whole Pulse thing was a thing.
It has been discontinued, in that there won’t any more updates. This is a tiny bit more hassle on Ubuntu only, in that it has snap preconfigured while you now need to add apt.syncthing.net once, which is simple enough though I think (and I think adding PPA’s is pretty common for Ubuntunites, isn’t it?).
Hi, I’m a user of MX Linux, and they distribute (thanks, @imsodin) Syncthing as a proper Debian package, and it stays right up to date. In their “MX Package Installer”, it’s listed under “Popular Packages”, when you search for Syncthing. Syncthing installs super-easily, from their GUI. No adding PPA’s, etc. (Note: MX Linux isn’t mentioned on the Syncthing downloads page, so I thought I’d mention it here, as people might mistakenly assume that since MX Linux is Debian-derived, they should follow those Debian-specific install instructions there).
In my Debian cloud VPS’ I have to use the suggested (official) method of adding another apt source. Works great, little hassle to set up. (Those VPS’ don’t have a GUI for package installation anyway, BTW). This extra package repository has never given me any trouble.
So yah, I won’t miss the snap package.
Nice that they include Syncthing in their default repo. Proper debian packaging sounded nice. I know that debian is putting a lot of effort into packaging go projects and it’s a lot of work. Thus I searched for what they do and it’s exactly as proper a packaging as the Syncthing project’s (mx-packageinstaller-pkglist/syncthing.pm at cce7e2d0f38d4cae1f213ff71a2a401a53c71d96 · MX-Linux/mx-packageinstaller-pkglist · GitHub): They use our repo (which is perfectly fine of course) 
I’m saddened to see that the snap has been discontinued, since I’ve used it for quite a while. I understand that choices have to be made in terms of developer resources/time, so I won’t protest if the snap isn’t being used widely. It certainly was the easiest way to get it up and running quickly though. Thanks for all of the work on Syncthing!
It’s the beginning of the end:
The HN thread has a lot of good comments about Canonical motives, and the reasons why people don’t like it.
Not wanting to resurrect a dead horse or anything, but what I thought the original Syncthing snap was lacking was the separation between the back-end (the websapp) and the front-end (the ui in the browser). So I went ahead and created a snap that does exactly that.
It defines a background daemon that is started automatically with syncthing --no-browser. And it also defines the syncthing command that when invoked on it’s own launches the browser. In this way the user can install it on a backend server or on their workstation, and it works either way.
The snap was published just 4 days ago, but already there have been 22 downloads. While not a huge amount, it is not too bad, I think. See here for the published snap and links to the repository containing the snapcraft.yaml.
I plan to expand it to make the port the webserver listens on configurable, but for now it does what I need it to do (i.e. be the backend for the Syncthing app on my Ubuntu Touch devices)
If interest should be there, I wouldn’t mind maintaining an official snap for this project.
