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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

#481

Post by commoner »

flatiron wrote: post #259
commoner wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While there are Snaps for server software, Snaps are marketed as a way to publish applications "for desktop, cloud, and Internet of Things" "across Linux on any distribution or version" - and users expect Snap applications to work properly on all Linux distributions, not just Ubuntu. Otherwise, developers could just publish a .deb package for Ubuntu like they did before. https://snapcraft.io Yes, Flatpak is targeted…

I don’t even know how’s it’s questionable. Every single update we do to prod gets regression tested except for “cross yer fingers” 0-days that we are exposed to.

Snap's automatic updates apply to major versions as well as minor versions. Major version upgrades in an automatic update could bring breaking changes or require manual configuration at an inconvenient time, and this is precisely what server administrators want to avoid.

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

#482

Post by [deleted] »

shock wrote: post #450
donmcronald wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they make it automatic and unmanageable by default, they can sell those features back to us tomorrow as an enterprise edition or a private Snap store. It’s the same thing MS did with Windows 10. You buy the product, but have to pay again if you want any semblance of control. Us normal users are now test subjects for the real customers. Look how non-enterprise Office 365 customers are on a monthly cadence for force…

> If they make it automatic and unmanageable by default, they can sell those features back to us tomorrow as an enterprise edition or a private Snap store. I'm not sure whether you're being ironic, but they're doing just that.

[deleted]

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

#484

Post by topranks »

qidydl wrote: post #449
shock wrote: post #421

I am very diligent about applying updates as soon as I'm able and generally read the changelogs of the updates I'm applying in Ubuntu's Software Updater. One thing I will not do is willingly allow somebody else a way to deploy and execute code on my computer without my say so (which snap is). After reading the whole thread at https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-for... and seeing Gustavo Niemeyer'…

I'm surprised that something like routing software is/was being distributed via snap instead of as a Docker container; snap seems much more targeted towards end-user workstations than to servers.

Often won’t work running something like FRR in a container (and therefore it’s own netns,) because it has to update kernel tables etc.

You can do it in a privaledged container afaik though.

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

#485

Post by PHGamer »

kanox wrote: post #236
cortesoft wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should you not be able to MITM your own machines?

Only in dev environments. Not on machines used by employees.

are you european. because in america its perfectly legal to spy on your employees usage of company assets.

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

#486

Post by ohazi »

ufo wrote: post #475
lucb1e wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also security updates? Wouldn't that make the new version insecure at launch until someone pushes a thousand security updates at once (making it kind of 'testing' again because none of these were in testing before and thus haven't been widely tested)? You raise a good point since I notice I don't know the process as well as I thought I did, but it seems odd that the frozen testing repo would only get all security upd…

IIRC, Debian testing doesn't have a separate channel for security updates. Security updates are handled like regular updates: they start on Debian unstable and then flow down to Debian testing. The Debian wiki mentions that delays can be specially large after a new release comes out. I don't know if I was misremembering it or if it can be problematic both before and after a stable release comes out. Hopefully someone…

This certainly used to be the case. There appears to be an actual channel now, though:

http://security.debian.org/debian-security/dists/testing-sec...

I don't know if anything actually shows up here, but you no longer get the error for security.debian.org when you try to upgrade via s/stable/testing/ in sources.list.

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

#487

Post by naniwaduni »

lonelappde wrote: post #190
vageli wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But if I had to choose between security and compatibility for 1 billion software users vs an occasional image orientation bug, This is a disingenuous characterization of my argument. The image orientation bug was a simple example. Further, why can't there be some kind of compromise where security updates are automatically applied and feature updates are not (of course I understand that the line can get blurry)? Las…

Maintaining forks of old versions is expensive and error prone.

Sounds like a good argument against moving so fast that you break things all the time.

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

#488

Post by zdragnar »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #462
zdragnar wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows lets you set your network connection as metered, and doing so prevents it from applying automatic updates. I recently switched back to linux myself, but there are certain utilities and conveniences and options in Windows that linux distros don't yet provide, and ubuntu definitely is not meant to be light weight in any sense of the term. Is switching to something else an option at this point?

I think part of the problem is that many newish users equate Linux with Ubuntu, good and bad. There are many other options and Ubuntu should not be the default anymore.

You aren't wrong, but I hate to say it... there are a lot of things that Ubuntu got right, and generally speaking derivatives of Ubuntu almost always work without any extra fiddling or driver hunting for me.

An experienced user could probably find a nicely tuned arch / manjaro setup to work better for them than Ubuntu, but if someone is just first getting their toes wet and learning, Ubuntu isn't a bad recommendation for a first go-round.

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

#489

Post by c3534l »

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 that you want to control your users, but when and how they upgrade is frankly none of your damned business. This busybody attitude has proliferated in software and it's an unfortunate direction our culture is going in. FLOSS software should be where we fight that the most.

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

#490

Post by ComputerGuru »

hhw wrote: post #381
ComputerGuru wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 C…

No, I didn't mean ZFS in particular when I said that. See for example how long it took to get Debian to allow non-free drivers.
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