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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

#31

Post by bluedino »

ordinaryperson wrote: post #21
bluedino wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Crashes, freezes, stopping systems from sleeping... I don't want Google's (or anyone else's) code running in the background doing whatever it wants. Want to check for an update and notify me? Great. But don't do anything else.

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

#32

Post by dmw_ng »

Matt3o12_ wrote: post #11
dopeboy wrote: 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.

The bottom line is they optimize installation time by amortizing it out over the runtime life of the package, or in other words, optimizing a one time 15 second process to be a 14 second process, in return for making a many-times 1 second process a 30 second process. It makes absolutely no sense.

They do this using a filesystem originally designed for embedded devices, using a driver hacked to disable threading support because the sheer number of filesystems snapd mounts would otherwise consume a huge amount of memory in per-cpu buffers used for decompression. In other words, they broke squashfs for everyone in the process of trying to make it work for snap.

On-demand decompression like this has made very little sense on desktops since the mid 90s, and even if it did, snapd's manifestation of it is particularly terrible.

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

#33

Post by vageli »

ordinaryperson wrote: post #21
bluedino wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Software companies are not infallible, and I've received updates in the past that have broken things. Enterprises don't get compensated for lost productivity when an auto-updating app results in broken workflows. Also, we recently got hit with a bug in a new auto-updated version. [0] It's great that this was finally fixed but silently rolling out updates like this make it harder to catch these issues before they are problems in the wild.

[0]: https://paul.kinlan.me/correct-image-orientation-for-images-...

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

#34

Post by chrisseaton »

Matt3o12_ wrote: post #11
dopeboy wrote: 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.

Isn't the point of compression to save transfer time from the disk to memory, not space on the disk?

That's why the kernel is compressed.

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

#35

Post by capableweb »

ordinaryperson wrote: post #12

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…

My two cents, you don't have to agree but thought I'd just add a different perspective.

I prefer my own package manager (pacman) over snaps for the following reasons:

1) I like to upgrade on my own schedule. I use my computer for work, and I cannot have things break in the middle of the day or in the morning, just as I get started with work. I usually save upgrades for when I less things to do, so that in case stuff breaks, I can spend time fixing it. This has happened twice during the last 2 years, or something like that. One time Firefox got broken (or rather, the version upgrade broke an extension I use) and second time some API in neovim changes to a couple of plugins broke. If this breakage would just happen by itself, it would break the two most common tools I use on a day-to-day basis.

I've used both Windows and OSX for my professional work and while Windows is the worst offender when it comes to automatic updates, OSX is pretty horrible as well. At least with Windows you can expect some sort of backwards compatibility, while on OSX, one day you have to upgrade your entire OS, otherwise Notes or some stupid application won't launch. On the other hand, Windows eventually forces you to upgrade no matter if you like it or not. So both of them suck equally, but in different ways.

2) snap seems to create mountpoints for the applications and never removes them. When trying snap apps I always end up with bunch of pollution in my environment. Could be that I'm using snap/snapd wrong, but left a sour taste in my mouth, as I saw snap as something that wants to solve a problem that existed for a long time. Instead, they look a bit amateurish because of this.

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

#36

Post by beckler »

comboy wrote: post #24
beckler wrote: 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?

We ultimately used a custom yocto image.

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

#37

Post by lmm »

ordinaryperson wrote: post #12

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…

> I wish all software would auto-update silently in the background -- when's the last time you even thought about upgrading Chrome?

Updating everything has always been one click in Ubuntu (and I'm sure there's an option to have it go automatically).

> 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 individual applications have yet to migrate Snaps?

Churn is bad, and having to migrate your application is burdensome. Maybe the benefits justify it, but what are those benefits supposed to be?

> Maybe I'm just naive and not doing advanced super user stuff these Snap haters are doing but from a distance to me this resembles the systemd vs init controversy. One which, IMHO, Linux super users seemed unusually attached to an older standard for not always clear reasons. Snaps offer real benefits: maybe instead of complaining that 'this sucks' users could offer constructive criticism about how to improve the new standard.

I hate systemd because it breaks a bunch of stuff but I'm still forced to use it. So far that's been my experiences of snap as well (specifically it breaks Japanese input for some applications).

What are those "real benefits"? You've only talked about auto-update, which was already working fine thank you very much. Snap, like systemd, seems to be more a case of https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html than something that actually makes my system better.

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

#38

Post by Legogris »

ordinaryperson wrote: post #12

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…

> If we all agree that on the whole auto-updating software is generally better and more secure than manually updated software, why not single out the applications that haven't migrated instead of blaming the whole standard?

Everyone certainly don’t agree on that. It really depends on the situation. And if that’s what you want, you had that already with unattended-upgrades. I really prefer to manage what updates, how, when, and under what conditions myself.

What’s next, forced unscheduled reboots a la Windows 10?

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

#40

Post by capableweb »

bluedino wrote: post #31
ordinaryperson wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Crashes, freezes, stopping systems from sleeping... I don't want Google's (or anyone else's) code running in the background doing whatever it wants. Want to check for an update and notify me? Great. But don't do anything else.

You might be on the wrong operating system if you don't like "code running in the background doing whatever it wants" as Apple has never shied away from doing just so. Try inspecting what your computer does when you've been away from it for 30 or so minutes, and you'll see a lot of chatter from Apple apps.
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