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

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

#381

Post by hhw »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #323
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…

Is there a way to get ZFS on Debian the same way as with Ubuntu (for someone that prefers text-based installers and is fine with an unsupported solution)? Debian has always had more ideological purity that got in the way of users being able to actually use their machine efficaciously.

It's not about ideological purity, but about respecting the GPLv2.

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/feb/25/zfs-and-linux/

IANAL but Canonical's justification for the ZFS kernel module and Linux kernel being totally separate works, and the distribution itself not being a derivative work of GPLv2 seems dubious to me.

https://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/02/zfs-licensing-and-li...

Seeing as how the Software Freedom Conservancy believes this to be a GPLv2 violation, and Oracle could launch a lawsuit as a result of it also being a CDDLv1 violation, I think it's safe to say that it's not just ideological purity that factored into Debian's decision not to include ZFS.

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

#382

Post by bsdetector »

Conan_Kudo wrote: post #337
Barrin92 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Squashfs has a sorted order to files and LZ compression is stable (change a byte and everything will be the same after the dictionary window if not sooner). So it should be really easy to make very small update deltas for snaps without any kind of complicated GIT-like infrastructure at all.

I've only glanced at the docs but Flatpack looks very complicated with lots of infrastructure and things that can go wrong; use Git to extract the app into a local repository with hard links to resources? It sound like typical linux centralized overcomplication.

Snaps may be slow, there may be a lot of machinations going on to make it happen, but at the end of the day it's just a file. You have the file, your program runs. That's a big advantage.

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

#383

Post by close04 »

michaelmrose wrote: post #346
close04 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 But when those decisions affect others? When your computer becomes part of a botnet and is used to attack a target then it's no longer just your problem anymore. The responsibility to prevent this must lie somewhere, either with the user or with the manufacturer. And…

It would be appropriate if you didn't try to misuse the present crisis to lend undue emotional weight to your argument. This is manipulative. Further your argument draws a connection but its spurious a sufficient difference in degree is a difference in kind. The way in which we comport ourselves while sick have the potential on net to kill millions of people where as the peril implied by users failing to update windo…

> It would be appropriate [...] This is manipulative.

Please don't make unfounded accusations and personal attacks based on suppositions. It was just an easy to understand analogy of how your decisions can have consequences beyond yourself, and does the job without any hint of "emotional weight". The rest is in the eye of the beholder.

> have the potential on net to kill millions of people

Talk about manipulative and lending undue emotional weight to your argument. Nothing gives weight to your own words like not following them yourself.

> one can reasonably suppose that one can with sufficient care design a system where updates are on by default and we don't create perverse situations which inspire many users to turn them off entirely.

This supposition didn't fare well in reality because it's easy to suppose but hard to implement. Especially when talking about a very complex system that has to be put in the hands of ~87+% of computer users out there, and work with tens of thousands of combinations of hardware, software and different configurations. And perhaps the most critical aspect is that the perverse incentives are left to the judgement of users with little to no understanding of the system or the wider implications of misusing it. They are more likely to follow terrible advice because the explanation for the good advice is too complicated. This is why the easy to understand analogy was useful.

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

#384

Post by inshadows »

ajross wrote: post #93
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.

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"…

> reasonably robust

> obviously used mechanism

OK...

> If you are running "mission critical" software, you need to be using a packaging mechanism (c.f. Docker) which lives at a lower level and provides harder guarantees about what you're running. Those solutions exist, they just aren't Snappy.

What? No it doesn't live at lower level. Docker uses same Linux APIs as Snappy.

The only upside of Docker when compared to Snappy is that it doesn't turn your hardware into zombie execution unit constantly pulling code from mothership (Canonical).

> 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.

There's in fact an easy way to satisfy both groups, but for some weird reason Canonical chose to turn every user into zombie execution unit, no matter the level of proficiency. It's not like a patch to disable this malware behavior would be hard to submit, but it's crystal clear it'd be rejected.

And it's clearly not for causal user benefit. They have documented switches to postpone calls to mothership. That's command line realm for experienced users.

I honestly wonder what their real motivation is. Those who seek to take back the control are people who want to control their own machines. The only thing that comes to mind is that sometime in future blog posts recommending to disable automatic updates would crop up and those dumb pesky users would just copy paste it into console without much thinking.

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

#385

Post by Firehawke »

littlestymaar wrote: post #363
m-p-3 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that point I'll just use Debian.

Debian used not to work easily on hardware that require proprietary drivers, did it change recently ? I left Ubuntu almost ten years ago, after 5 years of using it, when they started using MIR instead of Gnome2 and I replaced it with Linux Mint and I haven't looked back. This whole snap thing looks like the new weird decision made by Canonical to make their faithful users leave :/

If you have proprietary drivers, you'll need to prepare a USB stick with them downloaded onto it. They won't be on the installer image.

On my older 2011-era laptop, that's the wifi and wired network that need those drivers. It's a bit of a pain.

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

#386

Post by pessimizer »

ordinaryperson wrote: post #90
wolco wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The auto update because users can't make the decision themselves is just copying windows 10 model. Do applications break after auto-updates? of course they do and that is something that is important to ubuntu users because they have to manually fix. Given the choice I would rather choose when to upgrade so I could set aside time for fixes. Ubuntu users are not windows 10 users. Why treat them in the same way?

Auto updates have existed long before Windows 10. It's great that you are diligent about updating your software regularly. But how many people do? If you agree that it's a low percentage, then why is not better for the ecosystem as a whole to improve security and compatibility?

If you're making up percentages of people who update when they see an icon and a message telling them updates are available, asking other people to make up their own numbers, then deciding that we should make decisions based on these made-up numbers, I think you're on the wrong track.

How often Ubuntu users who turn auto-update off manually update themselves is an actual thing that can be researched. It's disappointing how many developers just think you should assume the worst based on your imagination and ego, then justify taking away control from users whenever one can get away with it as a safety measure.

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

#387

Post by Firehawke »

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 wonder how this affects offshoot distros like kubuntu?

I'm currently on Debian with KDE, but I think I might need to move to a rolling release distro due to some issues with SMB/CIFS (that have already been fixed in newest builds of KDE) that probably won't be fixed in Debian until the next release.

Maybe I should start looking at distros in general-- but Ubuntu is definitely out of the picture.

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

#388

Post by Iolaum »

I moved from Ubuntu MATE to Fedora MATE for this reason. One reason I use free software is that I get to have the final say in what my computer does. There's a big thread at snapcraft forums asking for the ability to shut off updates. Canonical wouldn't bulge. So I ve moved elsewhere and thank the Linux ecosystem for allowing diversity so that I can still use it as I d like to.

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

#389

Post by tannhaeuser »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #367
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…

Shared dependencies made sence back in the day, when the world was a simpler place and there was less variety. We have long since arrived at a point where its much more sensible to sandbox every application, with a majority of it's dependencies - less things break, less compatability problens, easier updates, greater reliability. All major operating systems have done this now, Windows, Mac, etc. There is no turning b…

Is it? On the Linux desktop there haven't been any new desktop apps for well over a decade (up to maybe Krita and the Blender redesign). Inkscape has been 20 years in the making and just released 1.0. These apps are basically developed against the X Windows API from 1983 or so. So for which hypothetical apps exactly we do need these enormous container formats isn't clear at all. It's not that the existing desktops apps like Libre/OpenOffice (also from late 1980s/early 1990s) have grand plans for new components, or run better all of a sudden.

Is it browser-/Electron-based apps that need constant updates? Then the developers really should consider their choices; why would I download a webapp along with a whole browser runtime repeatedly rather than simply run the app from their website, especially when the target environment is also sandboxed like a browser? That simply doesn't make sense. At a certain point, after over 25 years of attempting to shoehorn the web into an app delivery platform, things get absurd.

It's true though that shared libs have caused more trouble than worth, and are the root of this mess. But the solution is simply to not use them and just ship statically linked binaries instead rather than put a layer of abstraction over them. Even on DOS/Windows back in the day users were able to download an .EXE.

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

#390

Post by lucb1e »

ultrarunner wrote: post #294
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 work at remote sites on cell connections. Part of the reason we moved to Ubuntu from Windows was the ability to control data usage, which is expensive. Automatic updates quickly become a significant slice of the bill when random decisions like these get pushed on users. Ubuntu was supposed to help prevent us from needing to chase this.

I have a much, much better idea of what process is using network traffic or other resources on Linux than on Windows (I don't know how often tracing tools pointed fingers at the "system" process for weird magic like CPU or network usage). Unless you mean the 20.04 LTS thing specifically (it sounds like you had this issue for longer), it should be exceedingly easy to turn off anything that runs automatically.
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