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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

#331

Post by searchableguy »

screamingninja wrote: post #289
searchableguy wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That boat sailed long ago. Windows has a pretty decent linux subsystem now. Even devs that were hardcore linux enthusiasts moved to windows. The benefit of linux is that it doesn't force stuff on you that you can't disable compared to windows. If you take that away, there are very little reasons for any normal user to move.

> Even devs that were hardcore linux enthusiasts moved to windows. Is this a personal opinion or pure speculation?

Just saw it within my circle.

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

#332

Post by thekyle »

ric2b wrote: post #307
gfxgirl wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

45 to 90 mins to update my Macs. They might not reboot 5 to 10 times but it's not quick. 19.04 Ubuntu just died on me today (I know some expert could have gotten in working). Apparently 19.04 support ended and someone took down the servers. So trying to update would tell me something about the servers having no release file. And they wouldn't let me update to 20.04 until I patched 19.04. I never modded anything. What…

19.04 isn't an LTS (long term support) release, it has 9 months of support, you're supposed to upgrade to the next release in a timely manner. If you're not going to do release upgrades frequently you should stick to LTS releases (20.04 is one), which are supported for over 4 years: https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle

Cononical should really keep the old repos up for longer. At least the parts necessary for upgrading to the next version. 19.04 is barely over a year old. It's entirely reasonable for users to leave a computer for a few months and expect it to still work when they come back.

Sure they could use LTS but that has the same problem, just on a longer timescale.

I could turn on a PC with the first Windows 10 beta and it would update to the latest Windows 10 no problem. There's no reason Ubuntu can't do the same.

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

#333

Post by gfxgirl »

bdamm wrote: post #301
koheripbal wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because on an Ubuntu Server, it's auto-deploying updates that I haven't even tested.

That's not insecure-by-default, that's just you having a (legitimate) issue with the distribution chain. Insecure-by-default is installing software that has known weaknesses. That the process doesn't work for you doesn't mean the software is weak.

Are they sandboxed individually? If not it's insecure by default. I mostly don't mind auto-updates on iOS and maybe Android as they're at least supposed to be each app sandboxed by default. MacOS is getting better at this. Windows sucks at it. Where is snaps on that spectrum?

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

#334

Post by petre »

nromiun wrote: post #285

> Snap applications auto-update and that’s fine if Ubuntu wants to keep systems secure. But it can’t even be turned off manually. OMG. Is this real? This is the exact reason I use Linux instead of Windows 10 or macOS. I am not a grandma who can't stay up to date on tech news. At the least there should be a toggle for power users. But no, you can only defer it. Am I the only one who doesn't like it when your already s…

We have already installed two new Debian 10.3 VMs instead if Ubuntu. It's quite a breath of fresh air compared to Ubuntu >16.04 which I had to fight all the time to do things my way. Still runnng 18.04 on the dev boxes though.

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

#335

Post by Jonnax »

koheripbal wrote: post #292
bdamm wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it insecure-by-default?

Because on an Ubuntu Server, it's auto-deploying updates that I haven't even tested.

Don't you have a choice not to run snap applications on a server?

If testing of updates is important then shouldn't you be running something's that's imaged or managed by something like ansible?

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

#336

Post by _630w »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #309
BenjiWiebe wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience the average Windows only user is just as clueless when Windows breaks. Which it does, plenty of times.

That’s not untrue at all. It’s just that when I have used that needs to reset his WiFi adapter, there are nice picture tutorials for Windows, and on Linux you better have some idea what a /dev/ is. Think about explaining to grandma over the phone. It’s just a non-starter for Linux. Which is fine, it’s what it is for a reason. But it’ll never have mass appeal because of it.

For comparison -

https://net2.com/how-to-fix-wifi-not-working-on-ubuntu/

https://support.microsoft.com/en-in/help/10741/windows-fix-n...

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

#337

Post by Conan_Kudo »

Barrin92 wrote: post #253
alerighi wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with snaps is that they are a stupid way to distribute software that doesn't solve any problem, while introducing many other. Basically a snap package is a container, that means an image of an operating system just to run one software. Just this idea should be considerered stupid, is like saying every software is distributed in a Docker container. It's a great way to waste disk space, and also RAM since s…

There's flat out wrong stuff in this post. First off snap packages don't waste a lot of disk space because they avoid duplication of shared dependencies by using file hashes. Snap packages that need the same dependencies won't duplicate them. Secondly, snap works on pretty much all major distributions just like flatpak (for a list go here https://snapcraft.io/docs/installing-snapd ). One big advantage that snap has o…

> There's flat out wrong stuff in this post. First off snap packages don't waste a lot of disk space because they avoid duplication of shared dependencies by using file hashes. Snap packages that need the same dependencies won't duplicate them.

This is not true. Snaps are just squashfs images, there's nothing fancy there. No deduplication or anything. You're thinking of Flatpaks with OSTree, which does do this.

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

#338

Post by daneel_w »

I was asked by a friend to get Netflix working on his Lubuntu 20.04 Linux laptop. He was running Chromium which comes without Widevine, and the extension wasn't available in the Chrome Web Store, but it can be enabled by simply making libwidevine.so available in Chromium's library path. But how to add a file to the sandboxed lib/ directory of a Snap? You can't without rebuilding the entire Snap as your own custom product, and then it's no longer a standard package from the repo so you lose the blessings of package updates! Maybe there's a better way, but I sure could not find one.

I had to ditch Chromium and unfortunately resort to Chrome directly provided by Google, with all of its privacy problems.

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

#339

Post by jorams »

snuxoll wrote: post #278
jorams wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft didn't have a choice. Given an option regular users will never update their computers I think this is a misconception. A few weeks ago I was updating my Windows 7 install that hadn't booted for a year or so. I opened Windows Update. It looked for updates, and found some. I clicked the update button. It proceeded to start downloading, by which I mean it would hang for 1 to 2 minutes and then download very…

The update loop on Windows 7 is more an artifact of the traditional Windows servicing model where updates aren’t cumulative and only periodically were cumulative bundles released, as well as service packs incorporating prior hotfixes as well. The Windows 10 servicing model doesn’t have that problem, a new cumulative update gets pushed out every month and can get a machine to the latest update for that branch regardle…

It's great that they fixed that part, but to be honest that was the most excusable of the problems. I understand that maintaining an update path from any old version to the current one can be hard, so updating in steps is fine.

None of the other problems are excusable though.

No download should take 2 minutes to start, especially from a company like Microsoft. Sure, an anomaly is possible, but this update loop took several hours and every iteration was like that.

No update should ever take 5 minutes after the reboot, especially on an SSD.

No progress meter (that isn't dependent on a remote service) should ever be at 100% for 40% of its total runtime.

No single update should ever require 2 reboots.

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

#340

Post by m-p-3 »

neetfreek wrote: post #328
nromiun wrote: post #285

> Snap applications auto-update and that’s fine if Ubuntu wants to keep systems secure. But it can’t even be turned off manually. OMG. Is this real? This is the exact reason I use Linux instead of Windows 10 or macOS. I am not a grandma who can't stay up to date on tech news. At the least there should be a toggle for power users. But no, you can only defer it. Am I the only one who doesn't like it when your already s…

Point taken on the shoddy behaviour, but if you'd like to try it out there's this helpful post on disabling snap[1] shared here[2] when I installed 20.04. Quick and painless! 1. https://www.kevin-custer.com/blog/disabling-snaps-in-ubuntu-... 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22972661 *Edited

At that point I'll just use Debian.
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