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Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

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Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#91

Post by encom »

Avshalom wrote: post #71
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…

>And now for a minor complaint that also feels most user hostile to me: why do the snap developers think its ok to require a non hidden directory in $HOME? Seriously my home directory is MINE, if you have to store application state there at least have the decency to do it in a hidden directory. 4 years old now. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1575053

Unrelated to Snap, but on Windows, trying to use the My Documents folder for your actual documents is frustrating, because a huge number of apps and games like to use the folder for all sorts of nonsense, instead of using %appdata% like they're supposed to.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#92

Post by miker64 »

shock wrote: post #80
101404 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be really bad. I used Ubuntu for the past 15 years or so, but that would make me switch to a different distro. So shortly after the Mir fiasco, why does Canonical feel it necessary to come up with the next dumb idea?

What is or was the Mir fiasco?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_(software)#Controversy

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#93

Post by JosephRedfern »

stefan_ wrote: post #85
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Snap team has some experience with this, seeing as how 20.04 has released and you still can't move the fricking ~/snap folder . Creating some generically named top-level folder in the users home directory is a straightforward fuck you to all users. Since 2017: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1575053

Yeah. That is what winds me up the most about snap. It is so... obnoxious! Why can’t it be .snap?! Or even better, something xdg compliant?

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#94

Post by bmn__ »

thinkloop wrote: post #41
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always liked OS X's concept of the Library folder, particularly back in Snow Leopard when it wasn't hidden by default. Applications need a place to save state, and you don't really want it to be hidden, because sometimes I as a user do need to change it manually for any number of obscure reasons. So you make a subfolder that's designated for apps to write to. There's no good way to put this into the existing Lin…

And the problem is gigantic, programs in general are completely broken - why does my entire system have to be compromised because I decided to play Catan. We need the iOS/Android model for permissions on desktop.

> We need the iOS/Android model for permissions on desktop.

This model is terrible. OS asks up-front: program wants permissions to do A, B, C, X, Y, Z: grant/refuse? You the user decide that the program should not be allowed to do X, so you refuse. Now the program will not run at all. That's about the worst design possible. A 10 year old can brainstorm a better design within a few minutes.

Investigate prior art:

    man 7 apparmor
    man 4 capsicum
    man 2 pledge

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#95

Post by olyjohn »

thinkloop wrote: post #41
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always liked OS X's concept of the Library folder, particularly back in Snow Leopard when it wasn't hidden by default. Applications need a place to save state, and you don't really want it to be hidden, because sometimes I as a user do need to change it manually for any number of obscure reasons. So you make a subfolder that's designated for apps to write to. There's no good way to put this into the existing Lin…

And the problem is gigantic, programs in general are completely broken - why does my entire system have to be compromised because I decided to play Catan. We need the iOS/Android model for permissions on desktop.

Do we really?

People still just click "allow" on everything. They get tired of getting questions asked, and just want the program to work, so they don't even read anything and just tap tap tap until it lets them through.

Access your files? Sure. Access your documents? Whatever. Send data off to our corporate data vacuum? Whatever, I need to see what my face will look like with an AR moustache!

Also, are you running Catan as root or something? How is it able to compromise your whole system?

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#96

Post by grawlinson »

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).

LXC (and LXD, by extension) is packaged on Arch Linux as a binary, not a snap. I'm really grateful that the packagers worked with upstream to make this possible, as I heavily utilise LXC in my workspace.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#98

Post by trystero »

cies wrote: post #57
djhaskin987 wrote: post #12

I installed keepassxc using a snap, but because it was in a snap browser integration didn't work with my browser because of the snap isolation, rendering it useless. Also it's kind of weird that hey Damon has to run just so that I can install snaps and one Daemon per snap, too. I'm pretty sure I don't like that.

Keepass as a snap because security right /s. This is an actual piece of software that has a history of being modded by attackers to steal credentials. Why would you put that in a snap?

May I ask what history you're speaking of? (also note that KeepassXC is a fork of Keepass)

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#99

Post by sour-taste »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #90
robocat wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and they just can't execute That’s a bit rich: are they not the #1 consumer distro, which hardly implies they are failing to execute. A successful product has missteps, so what. > I don't want to run that garbage on my desktop. So don’t. Why complain that others do? I use Ubuntu because it works and I can mostly find information about how to do what I want. There are major aspects of Ubuntu I don’t like (Gnome, Sna…

> That’s a bit rich: are they not the #1 consumer distro, which hardly implies they are failing to execute All the hard work to make it a viable OS is done by Debian. Canonical just adds some polish and then wrecks it all with poor design decisions over and over again.

Then why doesn't everyone use Debian?

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#100

Post by buzzert »

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…

Does anybody know why lxd is shipped via snaps? It's kind of confusing, because it seems like snap should be built on top of lxd. If you're running a container inside of lxd inside of snap, does that mean it's two layers of sandboxing?
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