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Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

kevin-custer.com

221–230 of 436 posts

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#222
post #143

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…

> 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

That's been the case with KDE for 15-20 years now. KDE 3.5 was a great environment (and Trinity (TDE) is a modernized fork of it).

Note that, this year, KDE added telemetry to their Plasma desktop environment. Of course, it's opt-in, so it must be acceptable, right? Well, of course, users who objected to the telemetry found bugs that caused data to be recorded even when disabled.

KDE's response was to ban said users from reddit.com/r/kde and call them "paranoid schizos." (The mods there are KDE members wearing "KDE developer" flair, not random Redditors.)

So, despite using and recommending KDE for almost 2 decades, it's hard for me to do so any longer. I wholeheartedly recommend checking out TDE instead.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#223

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?

Do you mean the clock? I don’t like it it there either. Used to looking in the corner.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#224

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…

Canonical packages LXD as a snap package. Other distributions can package LXD in their favorite packaging format, and some do.

Some developers are trying to package for Debian. The work is in progress at https://wiki.debian.org/LXD

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#225
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wasn’t there some big kerfuffle years ago involving KDE, Qt, and licensing?

You could look it up on Wikipedia. KDE and Qt are Free Software.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#226

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…

> Snaps break debain's stable release model. They allow upstream to ship updates outside of the normal 6 month ubuntu releases.

In fairness, I think that's the point, just like RHEL streams.

> 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.

Yeah, decent idea, poor execution. Especially for system/infrastructure software like LXD. I want a stable kernel, a stable glibc, a stable LXD/Docker/k8s/whatever, and then on top, bleeding-edge applications that will not break the world if they autoupdate at random to a less-tested version.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why doesn't everyone use Debian?

Debian has its own set of problems. Like the Chromium package maintainer deciding unilaterally several years ago that installing extensions remotely shouldn't be allowed and gated that standard functionality behind a command ling flag. There was zero documentation on the change and the error you received attempting to install an extension was basically "operation failed". I discovered the cause only because there was…

There is also the ffmpeg kerfuffle a few years back when Debian decided to replace the ffmpeg package with an incompatible and inferior fork. You can imagine the amount of confusion that ensued.

That said, I think Debian's occasional messups are far less egregious and damaging than Ubuntu's though.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#228
post #105
post #43

I wanted to like snaps (and flatpaks before then), because trying to ease packaging and deployment of apps on Linux is a noble goal, but in both cases I eventually gave up on non-trivial use of them because they were always broken in some annoying way because of their sandboxing. The latest snap I had to get rid of was Visual Studio Code, because I was trying to work on an open source game with it, and I found out th…

Snaps certainly have some usability problems. E.g. to use videoconferencing in Chromium I had to give it rights to connect to record audio explicitly. I expect you needed to do something like that for the VS Code snap.

I did that too, and it works for one minute, every time I start the browser. Firefox it is.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#229
post #43

I wanted to like snaps (and flatpaks before then), because trying to ease packaging and deployment of apps on Linux is a noble goal, but in both cases I eventually gave up on non-trivial use of them because they were always broken in some annoying way because of their sandboxing. The latest snap I had to get rid of was Visual Studio Code, because I was trying to work on an open source game with it, and I found out th…

AppImages are a disaster waiting to happen. They are like Windows MSI installation files just downloaded from somewhere, running without any confinement.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#230
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…

> I don’t like (Gnome, Snap) Snaps may be a pain sometimes, but Gnome seems to be working like a charm...

> like a charm.

Like a Juju one? :)

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