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Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

kevin-custer.com

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Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#161

Post by monadic2 »

_jal wrote: post #48
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 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 guess users have been sufficiently beaten into submission that many of them will put up with software randomly quitting on them

A cultural acceptance of WIP software seems common, in free software communities, in my experience.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#162

Post by Thaxll »

sour-taste wrote: post #99
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #90

Earlier 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?

Maybe when they tought that none-free drivers opt-in was a good idea, also old kernel / packages.

LTS on Ubuntu was always better than Debian, I mean saying that Ubuntu is just a repackage of Debian is very short sighted, especially on the security side, Canonical security team is top notch.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#163

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

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 had a rough start, but grew to be a pretty nice DE. I actually remember it warmly every time I see how Gnome3 eats 3 horizontal bars of screen space, placing a freaking WATCH on the center of the top bar.

Seriously, a whole bar for a WATCH? How come good old Gnome2 did it better 15 years ago, and had a terrific hierarchical menu, to add?

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#165

Post by harry8 »

harry8 wrote: post #109
sour-taste wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why doesn't everyone use Debian?

Because it's popular it gets 3rd party support. So people use it making it popular. Vicious/virtuous circle depending on whether you're looking at it from above or below. Just like windows Shuttleworth admires and seeks emulate so very much.

Sigh. ok then let me explain that last comment.

It's called a network externality. Microsoft achieved this with piracy based market penetration of dos and it worked great for them and they've built on it ever since.

Shuttleworth understood the importance of getting established as being popular when he launched and would press install disks, as many as you asked for, and ship them to you at his own cost. As one example of nakedly going after market share and spending resource to do so.

Bug #1 in the ubu bug tracker is literally "windows is the most popular os."

Separate to the marketing, which is worth discussing on this site because some of us actually care about what works and why so wish to discuss it, let's talk engineering decisions.

Between 2 choices that are technically about equal. Choose the one that is more popular. Many feet trample more bugs. Better support. More likely to be around after $time_period. If it needs to work with something else, the managers of the something else project will likely suppor the more popular first etc. Obviously popularity is not the only concern but it really does count for something, ignore it as a dimension in your decision process at your peril. I use linux, and ubuntu as it happens on this laptop. I'm aware windows and osx are more popular and that popularity makes certain things easier. For /my/ purposes and to /my/ taste linux and ubuntu are worth paying that cost to have installed here and I'm very comfortable with that decision.

Just quietly, perhaps people who don't care for business decisions and engineering decisions are on the wrong website? There's plenty of places "boosters" can go to do that.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#166

Post by Wowfunhappy »

Denvercoder9 wrote: post #141
bmn__ wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is also how iOS has worked since forever. I think it's helpful, but not that helpful.

In practice, apps that want access to my contacts usually keep asking for access every time I try to do anything, until I eventually either relent to make the prompts go away or click allow by accident.

And that's me as a computer-enthusiast. I would bet money most normal people just hit allow always. Because it's easier.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#167

Post by ghthor »

readwind wrote: post #29
adito wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think ubuntu also has similar stuff via PPA repository?

PPA is hell. Arch is love and life.

The AUR is so transparent. If I want to see how the AUR package is getting built, ez, read the PKGBUILD linked right from the packages page. I was immediately turned off to using Snap because I couldn't find how the Snap was built and really who built it. No Thanks, that's not how I install software on my personal computer anymore, it's one of the main reasons I exited windows as soon as I started to learn about infosec and trust.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#168

Post by snazz »

sneak wrote: post #143
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 use…

It's interesting how underrepresented KDE is in the "big distros". While it makes sense that Fedora and Ubuntu ship GNOME, and there are "spins" of each that include different desktops out of the box, it still surprises me.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#169

Post by jcelerier »

sour-taste wrote: post #99
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #90

Earlier 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?

Debian did not send free CDs by mail

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#170

Post by agentx3r »

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…

Hear hear. I imagine for dogfooding, LXD is only packaged in snap, so we can't use apt as the source anymore. After migrating, an upstream push to a 'stable' LXD snap channel introduced a regression that borked our environments, and there was no way to:

1. prevent machines in the fleet from pulling the broken LXD update

2. rollback broken machines to the previously working LXD version on the same channel, since it no longer existed in the Snap Store™.

What a joke! Now we're burnt on snap _and_ LXD.

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