Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

kevin-custer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 436 posts

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#61

Post by avhception »

jaytaylor wrote: post #6

Kudos to the OP, I'm glad this got posted on hacker news because Snap is so ridiculously broken. Since 16.04, Snaps have been a huge pain for me with running LXC in production environments. By default, Snap applies updates and restarts Systemd services anytime it likes, and there's no way to turn this behavior off! The only way to get around it is to download the Snap package binary and install that directly. Then Sn…

I've got an ansible playbook that modifies my ~/.config/lxc/config.yml for certain deployment scenarios.

Due to LXC now being a snap, the file is simply not there. I guess it's 5 layers deep in namespaces, overlayfs and other stuff. I was so fed up with this that I removed Ubuntu (and replaced it with Gentoo).

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#62

Post by Shared404 »

benjaminjackman wrote: post #31

So I've used ubuntu (Xubuntu, xfce) for quite a while and would rather not deal with this, are there any distros that aim to be ubuntu but without snap? Because hearing things like `sudo apt install chromium` actually aliases to using snap is disconcerting to say the least if true.

Pop!_Os is basically just Ubuntu but better. They will have flatpak integration with the store app with 20.04, but the official stance is to use the deb packages first, and then fall back to flatpak if there is no deb available.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#63

Post by mulmen »

sq_ wrote: post #18
Spivak wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's a pretty good one since the experience with having a large catalog of useful software in Flatpaks has been awesome and largely seamless. I just wish Canonical wasn't off doing their own thing or had started out in the open from the start so it would have a chance of being a useful standard instead of the weird Canonical store.

I can never figure out Canonical's logic with going off to do their own thing. They don't do it with everything, so clearly it's not a complete rejection of things not made in-house. It seems like they also often end up going back to the community solutions/standards eventually, so what benefit do they see in doing this over and over again?

Does it force the community solution to improve? If the options are community or Canonical does that competition have benefits to both? Not sure Canonical are thinking that explicitly but maybe it’s just hedging their bets if the community solution doesn’t work out.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#64

Post by matthewbauer »

mulmen wrote: post #53
psanford wrote: post #22

I really like the idea of snaps. I really don't like a lot of the execution decisions around them. Snaps break debain's stable release model. They allow upstream to ship updates outside of the normal 6 month ubuntu releases. There are times when you might want this, but it should be opt in not mandatory. I thinking specifically of lxd which is only shipped via snaps. The snap store's trust model is confusing. Its har…

I don’t have any experience with snaps so this is all new to me. Snaps install software at a system level right? Why on earth would there be anything in a user home directory? What if you have multiple users? Does snap get confused?

Most likely they download some things when you first run the software. This pretty common but usually opaque to the user due to it being in .local or .cache.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#66

Post by james_s_tayler »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #15
jaytaylor wrote: post #6

Kudos to the OP, I'm glad this got posted on hacker news because Snap is so ridiculously broken. Since 16.04, Snaps have been a huge pain for me with running LXC in production environments. By default, Snap applies updates and restarts Systemd services anytime it likes, and there's no way to turn this behavior off! The only way to get around it is to download the Snap package binary and install that directly. Then Sn…

Ugh, is it still impossible to disable Snap autoupdates? Even if people should be updating regularly, forcing them feels completely antithetical to the Linux ethos of users having control over their devices.

I remember updating Ubuntu once. It bricked my installation for some reason. Ever since then I rarely update software.

With Ubuntu I just wait until the next LTS.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#67

Post by coolspot »

mulmen wrote: post #53
psanford wrote: post #22

I really like the idea of snaps. I really don't like a lot of the execution decisions around them. Snaps break debain's stable release model. They allow upstream to ship updates outside of the normal 6 month ubuntu releases. There are times when you might want this, but it should be opt in not mandatory. I thinking specifically of lxd which is only shipped via snaps. The snap store's trust model is confusing. Its har…

I don’t have any experience with snaps so this is all new to me. Snaps install software at a system level right? Why on earth would there be anything in a user home directory? What if you have multiple users? Does snap get confused?

Snap stores user-specific application data in /home/user/snap/ folder. Like when packaged application wants to write into $HOME, snap gives it some sub-folder inside /home/user/snap.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#68

Post by ngngngng »

ressetera wrote: post #65

Snaps are great for auto updating software, especially the ones from JetBrains. I think most users will be fine. Those of us who need more fine grained control, can have it.

You'd be surprised. Whenever my helm snap updates it breaks all the authentication I previously set up. And I get a weird error. That's not me needing fine grained control. It's just snaps being awful.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#69

Post by m-p-3 »

avhception wrote: post #61
jaytaylor wrote: post #6

Kudos to the OP, I'm glad this got posted on hacker news because Snap is so ridiculously broken. Since 16.04, Snaps have been a huge pain for me with running LXC in production environments. By default, Snap applies updates and restarts Systemd services anytime it likes, and there's no way to turn this behavior off! The only way to get around it is to download the Snap package binary and install that directly. Then Sn…

I've got an ansible playbook that modifies my ~/.config/lxc/config.yml for certain deployment scenarios. Due to LXC now being a snap, the file is simply not there. I guess it's 5 layers deep in namespaces, overlayfs and other stuff. I was so fed up with this that I removed Ubuntu (and replaced it with Gentoo).

I came to the realization that my home server doesn't need Ubuntu, it needs Debian.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#70

Post by thomaslord »

simlevesque wrote: post #39
csdreamer7 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snaps have benefits. Canonical sells 5 year service subscriptions in addition to the 5 years they already offer for free on LTS. Snaps enable a way to get the latest VSCode and other apps on very old versions of Ubuntu. Snaps allowed me to try out Debian and Fedora with minimal issues and easily integrate them into my dotfile manager with Ansible.

The VSCode part is real. I had to install it on Ubuntu 17.04 a couple of weeks ago and it took me hours.

I spent just as long fighting snap when I wanted to use a custom font with ligatures. User-installed fonts don't work with snap, apparently. I would've spent substantially less time figuring out the problem, but I didn't even know I had the snap version - I typed `apt install code` and transparently got a snap package instead of a deb.
Post reply on HN