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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

#351

Post by SlowRobotAhead »

_630w wrote: post #336
SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yea, “ First determine the name of your WiFi interface by issuing the command : nmcli d “

I knew that, but only in the back of my head. If the internet wasn’t working, you know, a WiFi problem, I would have a very tough time remembering that. Which is the point, trying to remember the voodoo.

And if I had to ask grandma to type in nmcli d then read me what she sees? Well, if anyone wants to prove me wrong, I’ll set my grandma up on Linux and give her your cell number.

I get that there are a lot of Linux fans here, but be realistic, it’s not for most people and never will be. You need autism or have never worked outside of tech lack the empathy of how mass computer users interact with their machines.

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

#352

Post by Shared404 »

ordinaryperson wrote: post #77
kzemek wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome, no. But I am running FRR on Ubuntu server, and it's also distributed as a Snap - in fact, that has spurred the most known discussion about Snap autoupdates[1]. Of course I can - and do - use the deb version, but it's just one of the critical-always-on things that can creep onto a system as a Snap. For example, LXD is moving with Snap as the default way to distribute on Ubuntu[2]. [1]: https://forum.snapcraft.…

OK, but why is the problem FRR not addressing bugs it may be auto releasing and instead the entire principle of auto-updates in general? If we agree that auto-updates on the whole improve security for the platform, why is that not a goal worth pursuing? Why are application devs totally blameless in releasing buggy software?

All software has bugs. Also, how are the application developers supposed to test for every single environment?

In an ideal world, you could get away with pushing all updates automatically, but I for one would rather not get my production server get totalled because of a botched update.

*edit to fix question mark

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

#353

Post by GordonS »

beckler wrote: post #304
GordonS wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A colleague of mine was also looking at Ubuntu Core for an IoT project recently, but Ubuntu wanted $15k/y to run a private, branded Snap store - erm.. no. If they really want snaps to succeed, there should be an open source snap store protocol, and 3rd parties should be allowed to run their own stores, just like you can add 3rd part apt repos, for example. We decided on Photon OS, BTW. It's tiny, and perfect for use…

Wow, it's gone up! When we talked, it was $10k/year, and then there was an additional cost for every update we pushed out. It depended on the speed, size and number of devices receiving the update.

Yes, forgot to mention they also charge for updates! Pricing page[0]

[0] https://ubuntu.com/pricing/devices

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

#354

Post by CameronNemo »

daneel_w wrote: post #338

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 pro…

Did Firefox not ship with widevine?

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

#355

Post by _lbaq »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #306
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…

I agree entirely. Unavoidable updates were one of the key factors in my choice to avoid Windows 10 for business-critical computing. I standardized on Ubuntu instead, but this could be a deal-breaker for me. I hope Canonical fixes this immediately. I'm not eager to spend time re-researching to market for a suitable OS.

Just disable snapd after you have achieved your ideal configuration. But yes, this should be a setting somewhere...

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

#356

Post by woofie11 »

josteink wrote: post #194
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?

I have three machine, one is Windows, one is Ubuntu, and one is Mac. The statement was relative. I never said Windows was understandable. I said more understandable. Nineties-era Debian, I felt I understood every piece of, to where I could fill in details with documentation or code in a few minutes.

2020-era Ubuntu developed the same layeritis as Windows, only worse. Microsoft cleaned up a little bit from the bad, old Windows 95 days too. Windows 10 is slightly simpler than Windows 95, but a heck of a lot more stable.

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

#357

Post by ajross »

stryan wrote: post #114
ajross wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, Snappy isn't aimed at "mission critical systems", nor even at bandwidth constrained users. It's a straightforward, reasonably robust and obviously used mechanism for pushing routine consumer software. In that realm, the aggregate benefit to society of having everyone running current software outweighs the annoyance of the specialists, sorry. It's always been this way. If you are running "mission critical"…

Ubuntu is sending out "Mission critical" software as snaps: I think the biggest offender has been LXD, but I'm sure there's others. That combined with Ubuntu forcing snaps as the main packaging method (i.e. you have to jump through various hoops to install .debs of snaps) is what a lot of the outrage about. (Side note: Something about listing Docker as a packaging mechanism makes me uncomfortable. IMO Docker and cont…

> IMO Docker and containers in general are deployment tools, not packaging systems

Obviously it sits at the boundary, but a "Dockerfile" is (at least when properly used) a recipe for reliably reproducing a specific version of software packaged in a format that can be deployed to all sorts of systems with absolutely minimal dependence on host configuration.

That's what people who want a "mission critical Snap" almost certainly want.

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

#358

Post by tannhaeuser »

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…

+1 Insightful.

> GNOME Calculator was put on the ISO as a snap to help us test the whole “seeding snaps” process, not because it was a fast-moving, CVE-prone applications. Chromium, Firefox and LibreOffice fall more into that category.

Ok so the whole snap thing comes down to updating browsers. Is this for real? I want the web, not the browser to change daily, or to consume more bandwidth than my www usage :)

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

#359

Post by dima55 »

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…

snaps are intended for non-power-users that don't want to deal with dependencies. Those users want things to mostly work without worrying about murky downsides. Auto-updating is exactly the right behavior.

If this is of concern to you, why are you using snaps? And why Ubuntu? What's the value-add over Debian?

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

#360

Post by maximente »

modzu wrote: post #127
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.

if you like Ubuntu and stability go debian. edit: the downvotes are fascinating. if you do LIVE performances and even remotely care about stability Arch is the last distro you should use. its a great distro but its bleeding edge by design. part of the fun of arch. contrarian views should be expressed with words if possible because id like to know what universe some of you are from..

i saw it explained once to someone else that arch is more cutting edge, than bleeding edge. it's not like you're getting beta software or anything with arch - it just updates very frequently. it's a hacker's OS at the end of the day; the culture is that you're buying in to the high ownership/control of your machine, ergo you're going to put a higher effort into at least searching wiki/forums/main page for issues.

you can actually get a very stable system in the same way you would any other OS: install only the packages you can live with. you can install, say, xmonad and no DE and have a slick, solid, low resource dev setup, whereas ubuntu comes with some goofy ubuntu software store that's not removable (or wasn't when i last used it) - one wonders what other "goodies" are in there, esp. after amazon search behavior change. remember that deleted code is debugged code: the more spartan, the less chance for issues. so arch's actually a plus there.

FWIW my boomer parents run arch on 2 different desktops solidly, without much sysadmin work from me other than a few pacman upgrades whenever i remember to VPN back in, perhaps biweekly on average. yes the occasional breakage happens, see above re: website/forum/etc.

debian stable was OK as firefox was fairly regularly updated for vulnerabilities, but the actual version number was lagging a fair bit behind. ubuntu LTS just seemed like a worse debian. ubuntu non-LTS is a non-starter: probably 50% of the dist-upgrades i ran ended up failing and basically needing a clean reinstall for anything not in /home, so it's fairly admin hostile in that sense.

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