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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

#401

Post by michaelmrose »

rlpb wrote: post #130
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…

> 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. You can arrange snapd to update on your preferred schedule. What you cannot do is defer updates forever.

You can just not install Ubuntu

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

#402

Post by ptx »

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?

What the application author wants isn't all that matters. It's the user's system, so they install what they want when they want to.

Ensuring that the user can easily install important updates while preserving the overall order of the system is the job of the disto maintainers for the distro the user has chosen. This is the whole point of distros. The alternative, where each individual application author has free rein to jam their app into the system without coordination, gets you the kind of mess Windows has.

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

#403

Post by lucb1e »

bdamm wrote: post #295
lukeschlather wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems irresponsible to inject devices into your network that that indiscriminately MITM all traffic and can easily be configured to log passwords and auth cookies, no matter what setting you're in.

It's basically the TSA of corporate networks. They need to inspect traffic because they can't control what devices show up in their environments and what malware might ride along side legitimate traffic.

Plus which, it allows me to check what black box software is doing. Certificate pinning is great and all, but it also makes it way harder to know what data "huawei mobile services", "google play services", or a random mobile game for that matter, is phoning home about.

I'm not a big fan of these corporate MITM boxes that contain the keys to the TLS traffic of the whole company (which additionally often double as employees' private phones and laptops), but I do like to look at my own device's traffic.

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

#404

Post by proactivesvcs »

mcny wrote: post #164
proactivesvcs wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given an option regular users will never update their computers This does not reflect the hundreds of regular users that I have serviced over the years. Perhaps fewer than five would postpone updates beyond a few days for convenience / uncertainty, the rest would always install Windows updates within a day or two of being prompted.

My problem on Windows has never been auto update. It is the forced reboot. One that Microsoft refuses to fix because "muh backward compatibility" and instead forces reboots. Part of the solution should be that Microsoft Windows should refuse to install on any mechanical hard disk or eMMC and on any SSD slower than a certain benchmark. The other option would be to minimize the obnoxious amounts of reading and writing…

>My problem on Windows has never been auto update. It is the forced reboot.

I agree - when one's workflow must be interrupted by either application or OS restart, then the software must work for the user and wait for a convenient time.

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

#405

Post by thawaway1837 »

ordinaryperson wrote: post #12

Maybe I'm in the minority but I like Snaps. I wish all software would auto-update silently in the background -- when's the last time you even thought about upgrading Chrome? The author of this article claims it's too difficult to find Flatpak apps and that the Ubuntu software center prioritizes Snaps over .deb. Are platforms never allowed to migrate to a new standard? Why is it Canonical's fault that authors of indiv…

Without commenting on the quality of snaps, I find Canonical replacing the App Store that supported all 3 distribution methods, with one that drops support for flatpak, and prioritizes snaps over .deb to the extent it will display a snap result over an exact matching .deb result in a search extremely user hostile.

And the fact that they first did it in an LTS release seriously jeopardises the trust is have in canonical. This is a deprecation which may have significant undetermined consequences. This is exactly the kind of change they should have introduced in 19.04 and then used the ensuing year to iron out any issues before 20.04 LTS.

What this tells me, however, is that for Canonical their business interests are placed above ensuring the stability of the LTS release, and that’s extremely disappointing to say the least.

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

#406

Post by Izkata »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #358
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 :)

That... doesn't make sense. Chrome and Firefox (and possibly Chromium, I'm uncertain there) already can update out-of-band of apt/etc.

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

#407

Post by fstephany »

aritmo wrote: post #9
dopeboy wrote: post #7

> I hate that Chromium’s snap takes more than 10 seconds to load on cold boot on a freaking SSD, whereas .deb and Flatpak apps load in 1-2 seconds. Can someone verify this? As someone who will eventually upgrade to 20.04, this is concerning.

Clean install, Ubuntu 20.04. Chromium starts in around a second.

Is it installed as a Snap?

From what I understood, only the first start is slow. Once the virtual disk had been decompressed, subsequent launches are much faster.

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

#408

Post by lucb1e »

ChrisSD wrote: post #145
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…

Be aware that Testing may get security updates much later than Unstable or Stable. https://www.debian.org/security/faq#testing

Does that actually happen in practice though? And as for the severity, we're talking desktops so the most critical piece of software is the browser. Firefox is the only piece of software I download outside of the repositories to make sure the updates come directly from the source, but other than that, openssh very rarely has serious vulnerabilities, to attack Thunderbird you'd already need to mitm my traffic... it's all rather unlikely.

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

#409

Post by thawaway1837 »

michaelmrose wrote: post #398
ordinaryperson wrote: post #12

Maybe I'm in the minority but I like Snaps. I wish all software would auto-update silently in the background -- when's the last time you even thought about upgrading Chrome? The author of this article claims it's too difficult to find Flatpak apps and that the Ubuntu software center prioritizes Snaps over .deb. Are platforms never allowed to migrate to a new standard? Why is it Canonical's fault that authors of indiv…

You claim that snap offers real benefits but list none and dismiss detractors as irrational and suggest that instead of complaining about Snap users who have no desire to use snap should invest their own efforts to improve something they have no desire to use instead of being critical. You are correct that this appears to be EXACTLY like the systemd debate. Snap HOPES to provide an easier environment for developers t…

The difference between systemd and snap is that systemd has been validated by almost all the major distro makers. The exceptions are largely people who don’t want systemd precisely because of systemd’s popularity, and they want to retain some diversity in the ecosystem.

Canonical could barely get its own users to prefer snaps over the alternatives, which is why they are forcing it onto them.

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

#410

Post by dima55 »

michaelmrose wrote: post #375
dima55 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You have misjudged who actually uses Linux. This setting would be ideal for all the billions of people Canonical wishes used Ubuntu.

Yes... Isn't that what I said?
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