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Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

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Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#141

Post by Denvercoder9 »

bmn__ wrote: post #94
thinkloop wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At least on recent Android versions the apps only ask for permissions when they actually need them, not on install time, and you can grant/refuse individual permissions.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#142

Post by hvis »

bgorman wrote: post #127
hvis wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unity was very good in a lot of respects. Both its UI elements and its performance. Unfortunately, Unity 7 depended on Compiz somewhat heavily, and when it came to writing a replacement of the full stack, Canonical didn't manage to execute. But have you been following last year's improvements to GNOME's performance and responsiveness? A lot of it is Canonical's devs bringing their experience from Unity.

Gnome 3 runs like an absolute dog on my Skylake notebook using Ubuntu 19.10. I don't know what metrics you have been looking at, but as a regular user I "feel" that the UI is constantly lagging during regular use. I didn't think it was this bad when I was using Fedora in the past, but that was a wayland based installation.

It's better than 19.04 was. :-)

20.04 should be better still (I've yet to upgrade).

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#143

Post by sneak »

coleifer wrote: post #49

Canonical always has tried to differentiate themselves, and they just can't execute. Remember Unity, Mir, Juju, upstart and all the other failed shit they've come out with? Snap is just more of the same. I don't want to run that garbage on my desktop. I don't need more daemons and forced auto-updates and all the baggage. I strongly recommend anyone similarly frustrated to check out debian, which is a fantastic distro…

I recently hit the wall with Ubuntu too. I'll still run -server in the cloud, but each time over the last 5-7 years I did point-samples of "is Linux viable as a desktop other than ChromeOS", it was always Ubuntu/Gnome. It turns out that that was my problem all along!

I tossed Gentoo and KDE (this is not a Gentoo endorsement, it was just a "hey I wonder what Gentoo's been up to in the last dozen years since I last used it") on a spare laptop. It turns out that KDE is amazing now. It's seriously the best DE I've ever used, and I'm a Mac user! (Half of the utilities I install out of the box on a fresh macOS are built in, and the annoying stuff that used to be editing arcane files is now easy preference settings. It's actually great.)

What the hell are Ubuntu doing shipping Gnome (with the ugliest custom theme known to man, to boot)? Admittedly it was my own ignorance, for which they are not responsible, but their mindshare and bad choice tainted my whole view of the state of the art for a long time.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#144

Post by RMPR »

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 can have pretty much the same with the tar.gz package, just unpack at a location, execute the setup to create the desktop file and some symlinks and you're set, plus you're notified upon a new update, no need to use Snap for that.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#145

Post by bscphil »

RMPR wrote: post #112
sour-taste wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Similarly, Mint is also one of the most popular distros, and its marketing, at least for a long time, has been that it's even more user-friendly than Ubuntu.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#146

Post by unethical_ban »

coleifer wrote: post #49

Canonical always has tried to differentiate themselves, and they just can't execute. Remember Unity, Mir, Juju, upstart and all the other failed shit they've come out with? Snap is just more of the same. I don't want to run that garbage on my desktop. I don't need more daemons and forced auto-updates and all the baggage. I strongly recommend anyone similarly frustrated to check out debian, which is a fantastic distro…

Unity was a good DE, and I have come to appreciate their design, which even today differentiates from standard GNOME. Also recall that it was made to be one DE for all: Phone, tablet, desktop. The idea was that you would have an Ubuntu phone, dock it, and use it as your PC!

And that is doable now, considering Thunderbolt. Hell, Oneplus should try to push OxygenOS to be tablet-like and this would set them apart from everyone.

Upstart was started alongside or even before systemd, if I recall correctly.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#147

Post by RMPR »

ilaksh wrote: post #79

The issue I had with snap was my server was going down. I thought it had run out of disk space like the last few times, but it seemed to be out of memory. Then I looked in htop and something related to snap or lxc was using most of the RAM. I think this is Ubuntu 18. Don't remember what I installed that used snap. But I had to remove snap to prevent my server from running out of memory periodically making my program…

You may have run into this bug https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/memory-run-memory-file-system-l...

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#148

Post by Koshkin »

djsumdog wrote: post #86
musicale wrote: post #73

> I lean more toward Flatpak as it is more performant What is "performant" supposed to mean here? Is Flatpak faster than Snap? more compact? simpler? more reliable/secure? easier to use? more efficient in terms of cpu/memory/communication/power/etc.? all of the above?

I always had problems with both of them. I use Docker a lot and Flatpak/Snap are intended to be a type of Docker for desktop apps. I know with Flatpak it has some shims to integrate with your system UI libraries so themes try to match up, but there are issues with that too (and flatpak apps just not starting up half the time). I really hate Snap/Flatpak conceptually. Use the package manager. That's what it's there fo…

> a type of Docker for desktop apps

By the way, what is it with Docker that makes it hard or impossible for it to be used for this exact purpose?

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#149

Post by mulmen »

fapjacks wrote: post #128
mulmen wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But this is a false dichotomy, because Flatpak is a project controlled by Red Hat. Unless by "community" project you mean AppImages.

I'm speaking in general, this would also include the Gnome churn a few years ago. Canonical seems to build their own thing then abandon it in favor of what the community was doing before or during the development of the Canonical thing. I'm just spitballing why that may happen.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#150

Post by bscphil »

buzzert wrote: post #100
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?

My understanding is that the actual features needed to provide containers are part of the Linux kernel. What LXD provides is tooling and a daemon running as root that are used to manage containers. There's no reason why these can't be part of a snap, it doesn't introduce another layer of sandboxing for the actual containers.

(That said, I would still prefer that they not be.)

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