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

#211

Post by guitarbill » Sat, May 02, 2020, 5:15 PM UTC

harrygeez wrote: post #110

na85 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gnome has been replicating the worst parts of windows (the registry comes instantly to mind) since the release of Gnome 3.

I think gconf and macOS's plist have proven that Microsoft is at least somewhat right with registry, or at least the idea is. I don't know why people didn't like it and honestly I don't have a strong opinion on it, but I have a feeling in some ways Microsoft didn't have much of choice given that they need to have backwards compatibility.

it's handy for config, sure. but it has several downsides. very opaque compared to a config file.. keys can't have comments. the average user has no idea what a "dword" is. some registry paths are obscenely long. you can accidentally break one program or windows trying to edit another's settings. and i'm not sure currently, but a big problem in the past was uninstallers didn't remove registry keys reliably.

personally, i think XDG_CONFIG_HOME + a robust config file framework with a standardized format (yaml/toml, whatever) would work as well. being able to specify a schema could be extremely useful, too, to prevent borked configs. as you've said, we've seen a lot of tools/OS's go this direction. and it doesn't have to be perfect, the 80% case would be a huge improvement.

i'm also sure the registry made a lot of sense at the time. it was probably way quicker than reading and parsing files. we didn't care so much about sandboxing/isolation and backing up. people probably had less application installed.

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

#212

Post by Enginerrrd » Sat, May 02, 2020, 5:15 PM UTC

zerkten wrote: post #203

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…

> 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…

The arrogance in this comment astounds me. It's almost never appropriate to assume that people don't have the right to make decisions for themselves, even if you think those decisions harm them. People have different values and weigh their own decisions against their own values, not yours.

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

#213

Post by lonelappde » Sat, May 02, 2020, 5:16 PM UTC

CarVac wrote: post #169

philliphaydon wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It takes a couple seconds to start the first time you launch it. Very much not instant.

What about the second time?

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

#214

Post by microtonal » Sat, May 02, 2020, 5:16 PM UTC

oarsinsync wrote: post #192

microtonal wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'?

However most packages in Debian are in main. AFAIK contrib is for FLOSS packages that somehow depend on packages that are not FLOSS.

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

#215

Post by jen20 » Sat, May 02, 2020, 5:16 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.

FWIW I tried Windows as a desktop two weeks ago, and gave up on it precisely _because_ the implementation of window snapping and positioning was so bad. I have a very wide monitor and need a way of splitting the screen into thirds, which Windows seems to lack.

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

#216

Post by nikanj » Sat, May 02, 2020, 5:16 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #206

nikanj wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sec…

I use a commercial OS, so there's a company out there where some well-paid professional decides which updates need to be pushed out ASAP and which ones can wait until next patch Tuesday.

I'm not sure if that person / team can ever be replaced by modifications to a version numbering scheme.

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

#217

Post by wegs » Sat, May 02, 2020, 5:17 PM UTC

darren0 wrote: post #143

ohazi wrote: post #115

If you're looking for an alternative to Ubuntu but want to stick with a Debian-based distribution, I'll continue to recommend Debian testing. It's a rolling release, so you don't have to stop what you're doing every 6 months - 3 years to install a huge update that changes the way everything works. It's more stable than the name would suggest, as long as you follow a few reasonable best-practices [1]. Software availab…

I tried going this route and the desktop experience was rough. Debian doesn't seem to have reasonable defaults for fonts so I spent way too much time learning and configuring all the font systems. So literally just the font configuration was enough for me to switch back to Ubuntu and just only install the stuff I like (no snap, gnome).

I ran Debian for maybe 15-20 years before switching to Ubuntu. The first few weeks are rough. But once you get it configured up the way you like, it keeps on ticking for a decade with no announced changes or surprises. You front-load a lot of the work, but then productivity stays high.

Those 15-20 years, it was the same Debian install. Everything else in the computer changed, but Debian kept on ticking.

There was a while Debian was behind on supporting things like laptop power management and graphics cards, when I switched to Ubuntu. For a while, it was a more polished, user-friendly up-to-date Debian. That was nice.

Now that Ubuntu re-invents the wheel each new release (and quite often, replacing a spoked, pneumatic-tired wheel with a square piece of wood), and hardware support is a little more standardized, I think it's time to switch back. It feels more like a tech gizmo, designed for Ubuntu developers, than an end-user OS.

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

#218

Post by Stierlitz » Sat, May 02, 2020, 5:17 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.

> .. and it is hardly unreasonable to accommodate them.

I think he meant you can't totally disable snap auto-updating.

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

#219

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 02, 2020, 5:21 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#220

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 02, 2020, 5:21 PM UTC

Achshar wrote: post #138

jimbob45 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The customer is always right. Say it with me.

Disagree. “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” - Henry Ford. Customer is mostly right. Not always. Use your best judgement as a business owner. Innovate where necessary and stick to customer feedback where you think it makes sense.

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