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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

#201

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

pengaru wrote: post #74
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.

With that Ubuntu has become useless trash joining the ranks of Android and its impossible to disable constant Play Store updates funneling endless unknown changes onto a machine you supposedly own.

What? The play store lets you disable auto-updates, at least per-app.

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

#202

Post by simion314 »

commoner wrote: post #137
simion314 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't flatpack designed from the point of Desktop users (GNOME) where snaps are designed with a server in mind? This would mean that are very different and you can't just substitute them.

While there are Snaps for server software, Snaps are marketed as a way to publish applications "for desktop, cloud, and Internet of Things" "across Linux on any distribution or version" - and users expect Snap applications to work properly on all Linux distributions, not just Ubuntu. Otherwise, developers could just publish a .deb package for Ubuntu like they did before. https://snapcraft.io Yes, Flatpak is targeted…

My point was about making clear that snap is not a flatpack clone, the 2 projects were started from 2 different perspective and have different architectures, just wanted to inform some people that would think that are the exact same thing and Canonical can JUST drop snap and adopt flatpack.

Edit: about autoupdates, I agree, the user should always have the choice.

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

#203

Post by zerkten »

harrygeez wrote: post #103
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.

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…

> Honestly I don't have a problem with that. But if they don't give power user the option to opt out, this is just disrespectful

The problem is that "power users" can't be trusted to use this power responsibly, or they operate based on assumptions that won't always be true. Either way they end up hurting other people in enough situations that this becomes an ecosystem issue.

Power users often help others set up their systems like they do, but those users can't manage them. Other times, power users will move on. When they were managing the systems, it wasn't a problem. Now that someone else is, the systems stop getting updated and someone has to clear up the mess. Yes, good power users help transition things properly, but don't kid yourself on the number of times this actually happens.

This phenomenon is prevalent in software. Just looks at the defaults which "power users" frequently choose (cf. JWT).

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

#204

Post by microtonal »

ssivark wrote: post #59
Matt3o12_ wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I constantly run into disk space issues. Apple still ships their flagship 13" macbook pro 128gb storage and they charge $200 for another 128gb. While other manufacturer's laptops charge a lot less for storage these days, most still only come with 256 which is not enough these days for development IMO. Even on my desktop, I managed to fill 750GB with various VMs and android development tools (the SDKs, etc). W…

Yeah, then stop burying yourself with Apple devices. Anyways, it makes sense to maintain something like an LRU cache, and compress only the least used things.

Why would you? lz4 decompresses at ~5GB/s on a modern CPU [1] with good compression ratios, that's still more than most SSDs can push nowadays. Most applications are small fraction of that size on-disk.

The problems arise when you start using xz-compressed squashfs images. LZMA2 is optimized for compression ratio and typically decompresses several times slower than even zlib deflate (which is already ~10 slower than lz4).

[1] https://github.com/lz4/lz4

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

#205

Post by Aeolun »

ordinaryperson wrote: post #68
capableweb wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My position is not that certain users would prefer to update on their own schedule. Of course there are. Or that new updates sometimes break things and that's a hassle. Of course they do and it is. The problem is if you want to distribute an important security update, what do you do? Ask everyone nicely to upgrade? How? Again, what % of users will manually update their software? Not a lot. For #2, that seems like a r…

> The problem is if you want to distribute an important security update, what do you do? Ask everyone nicely to upgrade? How? Again, what % of users will manually update their software? Not a lot.

The thing is, I do not give a rats ass what the maintainer of the software wants.

I’m sure they’d like their software to be patched quickly on all the PC’s that use it, and more power to them. But I do not want their decision to patch something to affect my system unless I explicitly tell it to, period.

If I do want my software to update automatically, I’ll enable that. Just don’t force it onto me.

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

#206

Post by derefr »

nikanj wrote: post #196
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.

How would you indicate to a package manager that something is a critical bugfix release, rather than a non-critical feature release?

Package managers (including snapd) basically just "think" in semver. Semver is one-dimensional: releases are arranged on a big line, and they'll know to auto-update based on e.g. whether a given release is close to your current release on the line.

For the cases where we do distinct security updates (e.g. kernel updates), we seem to do them using all sorts of hacks.

Maybe we just need a superset of semver, that can encode more than just the "newness" dimension, but also the "criticality" dimension?

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

#207

Post by jlgaddis »

tom_devref wrote: post #104

I really dislike the way snaps create disk partitions. When I run $ df I want to see what I defined during OS installation, not a dozen nasty snap mounts. An application misusing fundamental system features like this feels like a violation of some UNIX principle.

FWIW, you can pass the "-t" parameter to "df" to limit the output to specific filesystem types (e.g., "ext4", "xfs", etc.).

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

#209

Post by rrix2 »

mavhc wrote: post #121
bepvte wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

gconf is like the windows registry how? is it just because its a centralized config store? how evil is an annotated, easy to use, non archaic file that some apps put their settings into?

it must be evil because Microsoft did it. Weird that they copied everything else Windows did and people didn't mind. There's way more evil things about Windows, like click to raise and menu bars.

Evil, huh?

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

#210

Post by firmnoodle »

philliphaydon wrote: post #117
jandrese wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's almost as bad as the calculator in Window 10. It's completely ridiculous for ANY calculator app to take that long to load on a modern PC.

What’s wrong with the windows one? It’s instant and it calculates things?!?

Yeah, I'm confused as well. I just tried Calc on win10 for the first time in weeks or months and it opened before I could count 2 seconds. This is from a SSD where it won't have been in cache.
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