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Snap/Apparmor deprecation #325

@silkeh

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@silkeh

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.

Note that Apparmor support will remain enabled in the kernel. Only the additional patches are removed.

Plan is as follows:

  1. Create a plan (this issue) ✔️
  2. Enable the migration and improve the QoL around Flatpaks: ✔️
  3. Create migration documentation ✔️
  4. Let staff and developers try the migration and gather feedback. ✔️
  5. Two cut-off dates:
    • On the sync after 2024-07-05 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 TDB snap will be completely deprecated. Update: there is some progress on the upstream Apparmor patches, so we're holding off on deprecation for the time being.
  6. Communicate this to users via:

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