So can anyone actually explain what Snaps and Flatpaks are? Why are they good/bad? And how do they compare to each other?
Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
111–120 of 436 posts
Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
Ubuntu has been marketed as a beginner friendly distro, with communities easily accessible using a Google search (thinking about the likes of askubuntu, omgubuntu, ...). So I'd say online presence and beginner-friendliness.
Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
#113To ensure snap will not be installed again see the apt config here: https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-setup#remove-snap This is needed because an every growing number op packages is "dependant" on it. Here I show how to install Chromium as a DEB package from Debian (on a buntu): https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-setup/tree/master/chromium
Chromium is actually the only real use case for snaps. It is so difficult to build/package chromium for a LTS distro that Debian simply stopped trying. See what happens with security updates on Debian jessie (which is under their LTS): https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/source-package/c... . Ubuntu made the right choice here: https://snapcraft.io/blog/chromium-in-ubuntu-deb-to-snap-tra...
Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
#114Kudos 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 guess users have been sufficiently beaten into submission that many of them will put up with software randomly quitting on them, but the idea that daemons should be snaps is doubly crazy. "Oh, Tomcat just updated itself, that's why we were down." I really have no idea what people are thinking sometimes.
I always resisted running Ubuntu in production, even when it was much easier to install the necessary software. When you pick a distro, you're picking their packaging and maintainer culture. I've always prefered CentOS for that reason. Even the little things, like installing a new package won't start/enable the services (because you should have a chance to configure it first) always came off as more pragmatic for system administration.
Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
#115Earlier 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.
That works with Flatpak/AppImage too though, right? For me Snap has always had that Canonical smell of not-invented-here, just like Mir, Unity and Upstart. All of those were eventually replaced with what a majority of similar linux distros settled on. I'm not saying it was wasted development or that nothing was learned but ultimately they joined the rest of the ecosystem instead of the ecosystem joining them. It seem…
Upstart actually preceded systemd and was adopted by Fedora, Red Hat, openSUSE and ChromeOS. ChromeOS still seems to use it, interestingly. It probably paved the way to systemd and probably fulfilled a need that no other init system could. Ubuntu was also fast to switch to systemd when it appeared.
Canonical cannot be accused of NIH for Upstart, it was a widely adopted clean init system at the time and made many distro's boot times great again. Service configuration files were also very easy and clean.
Unity was a desktop environment that both was liked by many people and reused many components from Gnome, I don't really see a problem here.
A point could be made for Mir.
Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
#116I've been using Ubuntu 20.04 for several weeks, almost since beta came out.
The snap thing is a pain in the ass. I understand the need for something like snap or flatpak. I had software too new or too old that wouldn't work because some dependencies were not updated or were too new. Snaps can solve that by allowing the developers to provide everything you need (or everything you need that is not on your system). But why would I want a snap calculator or a snap system monitor? On 19.04 it would take a couple seconds to open the calculator...thank god they reverted those apps as normal packages.
Now I feel like I felt on Windows when I had to be extra careful installing software in case somethign weird came in the installer. What kind of package is this? Is it a snap? Can I install the normal package? Is the snap provided by someone trustworthy?
I also had to install Unity. Gnome lacks support for multiple monitors. Some stuff like the dash working only on the main monitor breaks completely my workflow. Almost for every action I want to make I have to change my focus to the main monitor.
Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
You as a user can still access hidden directories. Most new applications are nice enough to respect the XDG specification.
Oh, for sure, but it's mildly annoying. Especially when a . is used to make the directory hidden, because I can't unhide that specific directory without changing the name apps expect.
What? Of course you can!
$ ln -s .hidden not_hidden
It's that easy. Really.
Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
#118Kudos 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…
You had to install snap on a production server?
I don't know how must be installed on your version, but on 19.10, snap can be completely removed: the only draw back is that pulseaudio depends on it, but I guess that for a server it's not that much of a problem.
Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
This behavior is such normal for all the apps (especially games) that at one point I thought it was a specification.
Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
#120I've been using Ubuntu 20.04 for several weeks, almost since beta came out. The snap thing is a pain in the ass. I understand the need for something like snap or flatpak. I had software too new or too old that wouldn't work because some dependencies were not updated or were too new. Snaps can solve that by allowing the developers to provide everything you need (or everything you need that is not on your system). But…
multiple monitor support in Linux is high on my list of reasons I keep switching back to my Windows partition.