Thanks for this. I followed the steps and it failed to unmount the current "core" mount for snapd because the target was busy. What helped me was to unmount it lazily by running 'sudo umount -l /snap/core/xxxx' and then purging the package. That helped things move along. Just in case someone runs into this issue.
Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
281–290 of 436 posts
Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Weird. I'm on a ThinkPad x230 Ivy Bridge and Gnome (3.36) is butter smooth for me (Ubuntu 20.04, fresh install). I did the minimal installation though.
What were you using prior to 20.04?
Windows 10.
And Void Linux/ i3-gaps before that.
And Linux BBQ / OpenBox before that.
Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I've been looking forward for this work to come to something working for some time already, but it's been already 3 years I've eyed on it, is it now coming to something working "soon"?
Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does anyone know if they fixed the bug where snaps don't work if your home directory isn't /home/ , or is on NFS?
of course not, the only progress so far has been people coming up with horrifying workarounds: https://bugs.launchpad.net/snappy/+bug/1620771
My god! Being unable to use snaps when you have “non-standard” home directory is ridiculous. What’s even more ridiculous is a response from snap developers - they marked this issue as “Won’t Fix”.
Dear snap developers, don’t make false assumptions that every user in Linux has to have home directory as /home/username just because standard Ubuntu installer does this. Only thing that you should care about here is $HOME
Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
#285Canonical 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…
> upstart [...] failed shit they've come out with?
upstart was pretty good. It just lost the popularity contest with systemd. I'm not sure if there's really anything serious to complain here about.
Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's critical? Don't use hobbyist software for that then. Take Debian or CentOS or something else with a non-cavalier development culture.
Ubuntu is "hobbyist" now? That's certainly not how they bill their entire platform.
Ubuntu, no. Snap, seemingly yes.
Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I strongly recommend anyone similarly frustrated to check out debian, which is a fantastic distro. It is true that the Debian people are doing a great job. > [...] if you're using Ubuntu and disabling snap, you're fighting against the current and I have to imagine it's going to be increasingly difficult with subsequent releases. Actually, snap was harder to remove in the previous release: you had to rebuild certain…
Give them credits to fix what they have broken?
It's not broken. People prefer not to use snap and want to remove it. But overall snap works, and apps installed via snap work.
Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
#288Most of our family PCs run Xubuntu LTS. Because they are low end / 10+ year old machines I always uninstall unnecessary stuff like snap. Have not seen a single case where I would have regretted this.
I have been using Xubuntu 20.04 for several weeks and it has worked well. Because that's a high end laptop I have not bothered to uninstall snap yet, although that has been on my mind.
I am surprised that the article writes there are snaps installed by default. Checking in Xubuntu 20.04 that's luckily not the case
$ snap list
No snaps are installed yet. Try 'snap install hello-world'.
$ apt show chromium-browser
Package: chromium-browser
Version: 80.0.3987.163-0ubuntu1
...
Pre-Depends: debconf, snapd
...
Description: Transitional package - chromium-browser -> chromium snap
This is a transitional dummy package. It can safely be removed.
.
chromium-browser is now replaced by the chromium snap.
Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
#289Kudos 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…
On top of all of this bad behavior... I did try Snap to install Opera browser. Opera is written such that you need to put widevine libs in a certain directory for it to work. After tons of hacking and Googling, there is zero way to inject files into the file system of a Snap. I understand the security precautions, but that feels ridiculous. I left Ubuntu after more than a decade over their obsession with Snap.
Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I've been looking forward for this work to come to something working for some time already, but it's been already 3 years I've eyed on it, is it now coming to something working "soon"?
Debian is a bad choice if you want to package go applications (or rust apps, for that matter). Debian requires that all those little static dependencies be individually packaged. Common container software like lxd, podman, and umoci are not found in Debian.
The following distributions package LXD (that I know of):
* Void Linux
* Alpine Linux
* Arch Linux
* Gentoo
Some of those are more suitable for production installs than others, but if you know what you are doing and manage your deployments well, all of them could work.