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Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it

jatan.blog

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Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it

#21

Maybe I'm in the minority but I like Snaps. I wish all software would auto-update silently in the background -- when's the last time you even thought about upgrading Chrome? The author of this article claims it's too difficult to find Flatpak apps and that the Ubuntu software center prioritizes Snaps over .deb. Are platforms never allowed to migrate to a new standard? Why is it Canonical's fault that authors of indiv…

Chrome auto updates cause issues on the Mac. No thanks.

OK, what issues does it cause? And are those issues outweighed by the security and standardization issues raised by non-updating software?

I don't know who all remembers having to develop websites compatible with outdated versions of Internet Explorer but I do and still have nightmares about it.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it

#22
We tried to make an internal IoT device using Ubuntu Core and snaps because the capabilities of it were very promising. We started a PoC and about halfway through we hit a major roadblock. Our enterprise network does certificate substitution, and Ubuntu Core absolutely does not allow you to install your own certificates globally, so our devices would never receive updates. We tried EVERY hack we could think up, short of making our own core snap. We talked to Canonical about it, and they didn't seem interested in our fixing our complaints without a massive amount of money, so our PoC died, and we dropped Ubuntu entirely because of it.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it

#23
post #7

> I hate that Chromium’s snap takes more than 10 seconds to load on cold boot on a freaking SSD, whereas .deb and Flatpak apps load in 1-2 seconds. Can someone verify this? As someone who will eventually upgrade to 20.04, this is concerning.

Took around 10 seconds to start for me, almost exactly.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it

#24
post #22

We tried to make an internal IoT device using Ubuntu Core and snaps because the capabilities of it were very promising. We started a PoC and about halfway through we hit a major roadblock. Our enterprise network does certificate substitution, and Ubuntu Core absolutely does not allow you to install your own certificates globally, so our devices would never receive updates. We tried EVERY hack we could think up, short…

What did you end up using?

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it

#25
post #4
post #3

The last time I installed the Ubuntu, I noticed gnome calculator took over a second to start in a VM on a new >$2500 laptop. I switched to a .deb, and it was instantaneous. Then I switched back to devuan and have been happy since.

The calculator was a snap in Ubuntu 18.04 as an experiment.

I was wondering why the calculator took so long to start on 18.04. I thought there was some problem with my system.

Doesn't bode well for 20.04. I've been with Ubuntu for a very long time, I like that it just works most of the time. May be time to try out another distro if all the applications are this sluggish.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it

#26
post #7

> I hate that Chromium’s snap takes more than 10 seconds to load on cold boot on a freaking SSD, whereas .deb and Flatpak apps load in 1-2 seconds. Can someone verify this? As someone who will eventually upgrade to 20.04, this is concerning.

Apparently, snaps are compressed to save disk space, which is why they take so long to start: - https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/9scoif/snap_package... Saving disk space is certainly useful for rarely used apps, however, your web browser (and any other frequencely used apps), shouldn't be compressed, especially if there is ample disk space.

Whoa, it is a weird focus in this day and age...

Especially since this has been a solved problem for ages without any real performance penalty. NTFS have had this since 1995 it seems and zfs probably since its inception.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it

#28
post #7

> I hate that Chromium’s snap takes more than 10 seconds to load on cold boot on a freaking SSD, whereas .deb and Flatpak apps load in 1-2 seconds. Can someone verify this? As someone who will eventually upgrade to 20.04, this is concerning.

https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/squashfs-is-a-terrible-storage-...

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it

#30

Maybe I'm in the minority but I like Snaps. I wish all software would auto-update silently in the background -- when's the last time you even thought about upgrading Chrome? The author of this article claims it's too difficult to find Flatpak apps and that the Ubuntu software center prioritizes Snaps over .deb. Are platforms never allowed to migrate to a new standard? Why is it Canonical's fault that authors of indiv…

Chrome, no. But I am running FRR on Ubuntu server, and it's also distributed as a Snap - in fact, that has spurred the most known discussion about Snap autoupdates[1].

Of course I can - and do - use the deb version, but it's just one of the critical-always-on things that can creep onto a system as a Snap. For example, LXD is moving with Snap as the default way to distribute on Ubuntu[2].

[1]: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-for...

[2]: https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/is-the-snap-the-recomm...

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