Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by shaan7 » Sat, May 02, 2020, 5:04 PM UTC

snailmailman wrote: post #89

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'm still on 18.04, but I agree. Discord and VSCode keep occasionally prompting me to manually download and install .deb files. I'd really prefer if they just updated automatically. Discord gives a full page "download this update to keep doing things" message that interrupts everything. (i think only on larger updates? i havent seen it in a while) A quick google is telling me that both have snap packages - I guess I'…

> Discord and VSCode keep occasionally prompting me to manually download and install .deb files. I'd really prefer if they just updated automatically

I installed VSCode from the .deb package on the VSCode website and it automatically added the update repository so that it auto updates via apt.

"Installing the .deb package will automatically install the apt repository and signing key to enable auto-updating using the system's package manager" See https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/setup/linux

Discord doesn't, though.

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

#192

Post by oarsinsync » Sat, May 02, 2020, 5:04 PM UTC

microtonal wrote: post #144

scrappyjoe wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

18.04 has a ten year extended security maintenance life AFAIK, so you could stretch to 2028.

Ubuntu security updates do not cover the universe repository, which contains the largest number of packages. The universe repo is 'community-supported', which means that a lot of CVEs are not fixed in practice. https://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-security/cve/universe.h... So, Ubuntu's LTS support is only relevant security-wise if you mostly stick to the main repository.

Anyone have any idea what Debian's LTS security posture looks like? Is it also restricted to 'main' and does it also ignore 'contrib' and 'non-free'?

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

#193

Post by ChrisSD » Sat, May 02, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #161

harrygeez wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a hard problem. And Microsoft didn't have a choice. Given an option regular users will never update their computers, perhaps partly due to fear of what they don't understand, fear of change, or maybe due to past bad update experiences. I witness this in my mom with technology all the time. Every time there's a popup she mini-panics, and she has trained herself to click close every time she sees something she…

>Given an option regular users will never update their computers, perhaps partly due to fear of what they don't understand, fear of change, or maybe due to past bad update experiences. You make it sound like an irrational fear but there's a real cost/benefit ratio to consider when you upgrade a machine. I personally always try to keep my machines up to date but stuff does break from time to time. Like last week an ar…

Arch is a rolling release, upgrades are expected to break the system at some point. Windows updates aren't meant to.

Most Windows updates are security or bug fixes only. The exception being the twice yearly feature updates. These have been an issue mostly because Microsoft had been using a random subset of Home users as beta testers for new updates. However, they are being less aggressive with this now.

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

#194

Post by josteink » Sat, May 02, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

woofie11 wrote: post #84

Is there any sensible documentation on this somewhere? I've been running Debian, and then Ubuntu, for a quarter-century now, largely because things just worked. .deb is nearly perfect. Having used Docker, it's the last thing I want on my desktop, for a whole slew of reasons. It's odd, Windows and Linux switched spots in that time. Windows 10 is faster, more stable, and more understandable than Ubuntu. Ubuntu is incre…

> It's odd, Windows and Linux switched spots in that time. Windows 10 is faster, more stable, and more understandable than Ubuntu.

I mean, you can claim a lot of stuff about lot of things, but saying Windows is understandable is pretty rich. You can’t even reliably cron a single script to run once an hour without weird, unfathomable, undebuggable bugs starting to pop up.

Care to elaborate exactly what you mean?

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

#195

Post by zozbot234 » Sat, May 02, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

majewsky wrote: post #184

simias wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Given an option regular users will never update their computers, perhaps partly due to fear of what they don't understand, fear of change, or maybe due to past bad update experiences. You make it sound like an irrational fear but there's a real cost/benefit ratio to consider when you upgrade a machine. I personally always try to keep my machines up to date but stuff does break from time to time. Like last week an ar…

> You make it sound like an irrational fear but there's a real cost/benefit ratio to consider when you upgrade a machine. 95+% of users have no chance of even making this cost-benefit analysis because they cannot assess the scope or risk associated with the upgrade even if they wanted to. They have to rely on vendors making those assessments for them.

> They have to rely on vendors making those assessments for them.

That's why I run Debian stable, which provides security updates and critical bugfixes for 5 years or more post-release with very limited changes otherwise. Maximized benefit, minimal cost.

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

#196

Post by nikanj » Sat, May 02, 2020, 5:06 PM UTC

greendave wrote: post #18

> Auto-updating of snaps can only be deferred at best, until at some point, like Windows, it auto-updates anyway. Even on metered connections, snaps auto-update anyway after some time. This attitude is obnoxious. Yes, not everybody is on a metered connection or running a mission-critical system, but some are, and it is hardly unreasonable to accommodate them.

I might defend this if the updates were something like a remote wormable hole, but the updates are more likely to be improvements to drawing avatar icons in Dark Mode or something similarly trivial.

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

#197

Post by hypnotist » Sat, May 02, 2020, 5:06 PM UTC

Can anyone recommend good rpm based distro for desktop(business env)?

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

#198

Post by searchableguy » Sat, May 02, 2020, 5:07 PM UTC

chrisandchris wrote: post #183

searchableguy wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux subsystem is there on windows. You don't have to use linux for majority of cases. Conda is pretty decent. But I want to know what specific things they use that can't work on linux subsystem? Maybe there are some and I don't know about them.

There‘s a simple reason: speed. Have you ever tried to use WSL 1 with npm? I doubt do, because it just takes 10 times more time than on „real“ linux. Also, it‘s way easier to work with multiple desktops and windows position better than on Windows where it seems that they are opening always there where you don‘t look. There are also quite a lot of others, IMHO.

I have. It wasn't called wsl but bash on windows back then. You had to disable bunch of services related to scanning files (windows defender?) to make it barely usable but since v2, they are using a lightweight vm so the speeds are significantly better compared to what you got on bash on windows or wsl 1.

I don't have anything to say about your other nitpick.

A good reason to use windows is games, Adobe and office. Games using anti-cheat will not be available on linux and if you can get them to work, good luck not getting banned.

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

#199

Post by lonelappde » Sat, May 02, 2020, 5:07 PM UTC

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.

If you want to professionally sysadmin your system, don't use a consumer convenience-oriented OS and userspace apps.

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

#200

Post by shrimp_emoji » Sat, May 02, 2020, 5:07 PM UTC

_qbjt wrote: post #168

daenz wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it's finally time to switch to Arch. This is an absolute deal breaker for me as well, as I use an ubuntu system for live visual performances, and I need to ensure that no unexpected auto-updates take place.

Just remember that Arch is a rolling release distribution so the updates you do get will be bleeding edge. I recommend setting up Timeshift and always backing up your system before updating; if you’re using BTRFS it’s instant (although ext4 is practically instant on modern NVMe drives). Also consider Manjaro if you want an Arch-based distro but don’t want to go through the trouble of manually setting everything up on…

+1 for Manjaro.

I always shill for it.

It's like Ubuntu if Ubuntu were rolling (so much faster drivers and DE features, but nerfed delivery to minimize breakage and still really user-friendly, with a GUI kernel and driver switcher) and if instead of PPAs it had a big repo that just had everything on it (the AUR, which Manjaro's GUI package manager, Pamac, works with once the setting's toggled).