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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

#611

Post by kikoreis »

canonicalwhistl wrote: post #553
kikoreis wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably not a surprise to you, but this is a hotly debated topic inside Canonical. And I apologize for that thread, as it really doesn't represent our best attempt at external debate. Changing a paradigm usually involves pushing the envelope and breaking some existing assumptions; systemd is everybody's favorite example of that in the Linux world. The root of this issue with snaps is the trade-off between built…

Sorry, but as a fellow Canonical employee, speaking from a throwaway obviously, it's evident to me that you're simply not telling the truth here. You know just as well as I do that if you criticize Snap within the company, you get fired. Especially if Mark overhears you. There is no room for criticism. You either drink the koolaid or you shutup. So, no, sorry, we're going to keep pumping out Snap and those who don't…

OK, I've had breakfast.

First, has anybody actually been fired for criticizing snaps? Your comment seems to imply through hyperbole that we don't debate inside Canonical, but in my experience that simply isn't true. In fact, I've seen a lot more intense IC to CEO debate in Canonical than anywhere else I've worked. It's not always super constructive debate, but I don't know how much better it is in any relatively small organization with the broad impact Canonical has.

Second, debate and reflexion is how these positions get refined. An idea starts out crazy and radical -- "let's make an OS which costs zero and which anybody on the planet can figure out how to use!", or "Launchpad will only support bzr", or yet again "upstart, not systemd" -- but over time it evolves towards a place of greater consensus. So I don't think we're the destination for snaps; in fact, if these blog posts are only coming out now, it signals we are rather early in the journey.

Finally, I can understand creating a throwaway account to disclose something you're not comfortable with at your workplace, but it's not cool -- nor constructive, civil or all sorts of C words -- to create one to and start with "you're simply not telling the truth". C'mon, I'm your coworker.

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

#612

Post by craftinator »

kikoreis wrote: post #542
imetatroll wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The the very least there should be a simple way to turn off snaps entirely. As in, when installing do we want any snaps? If we don't, don't even install the snap ecosystem. After install, have I decided I don't want snaps? If so, uninstall the entire ecosystem. Do these options currently exist?

The challenge is that a) we don't really want to (can't afford to, etc) maintain a forked package for everything which comes in snaps and b) snaps are really, really, much better for publishing and maintaining certain classes of application, in particular complex ones with hundreds of dependencies and a massive surface area, like a web browser. And users want web browsers, so the default is to include snaps. In gener…

You mention that snaps are really well suited for installing and updating large surface applications like web browsers. Then you say that by removing snapd you will opt out of critical components. If Canonical is using snaps for large third party applications so their maintainers can push updates without user intervention, why would it EVER use snaps for critical components? Like, wtf is that? If something is critical to my system, I need to decide when it is modified. The maintainers can't possibly know when that's okay. Using snaps for anything important is a serious regression.

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

#613

Post by craftinator »

zentiggr wrote: post #563
kikoreis wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The challenge is that a) we don't really want to (can't afford to, etc) maintain a forked package for everything which comes in snaps and b) snaps are really, really, much better for publishing and maintaining certain classes of application, in particular complex ones with hundreds of dependencies and a massive surface area, like a web browser. And users want web browsers, so the default is to include snaps. In gener…

I've not used Ubuntu but was about to search for a distro to put on a rebuild machine... I was considering Ubuntu up until I heard about this. As a former Gentoo user, this whole Snap concept is a huge deal-breaker. I wouldn't consider Ubuntu for anything other than some thin-client/smart terminal/kiosk usage, and I'd still be wary of what gets pushed and what sort of potential holes might get opened. > but you'll mi…

> I wouldn't consider Ubuntu for anything other than some thin-client/smart terminal/kiosk usage

Until the snap maintainer of Qt decides to upgrade you out of version compliance with your compositor and... Well, hope your kiosk doesn't do anything critical...

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

#614

Post by craftinator »

lucb1e wrote: post #393
excalibur wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is snap somehow user-hostile? Yes, but more importantly it's insecure. The ease of typo-squatting is a real problem.

Isn't using the internet insecure then? I can typo bankname.example.nl as well. Not that I don't see your point: a curated list like the repositories is preferable to a system where anyone can claim any name, but I am not sure that this extrapolates to the statement that "it's insecure" as a whole. Out of interest (I don't use Ubuntu/snaps myself), is that really the case? Can I actually a publish without any checks…

> Isn't using the internet insecure then? I can typo bankname.example.nl as well.

Sweet strawman argument dude. "That's bad, but this other unrelated thing is also bad, so the first thing can't be THAT bad in comparison". For real though, this is like a picture perfect example. I may put it on the Wikipedia page.

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

#615

Post by craftinator »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #507
michaelmrose wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can just not install Ubuntu

That is pretty much the thrust of the OP itself, and most of the agreeing comments. So While true, it doesn't seem to be much of an observation. At the same time, it's also perfectly valid to instead, express what you want and don't want, and generally try to fix something that has broken or correct the aim of something that has veered off course. Approving of the new change is also valid for that matter. The only in…

This is the most constructive comment I've seen in this thread.

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

#616

Post by jwatte »

kikoreis wrote: post #513
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'…

It's probably not a surprise to you, but this is a hotly debated topic inside Canonical. And I apologize for that thread, as it really doesn't represent our best attempt at external debate. Changing a paradigm usually involves pushing the envelope and breaking some existing assumptions; systemd is everybody's favorite example of that in the Linux world. The root of this issue with snaps is the trade-off between built…

It sounds to me like the omission of an opt-out configuration is the entire technical problem. However, it sounds to me like the real irritant here is the presumption that omitting that configuration is in any way something that benefits the linux community. Defaulting it on is fine. The users who don't care to dive in, will then have it on, and the herd immunity to security problems is achieved. Telling long-time linux users that "what you want is wrong," is, shall we say, worrysome.

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

#617

Post by dchyrdvh »

Ubuntu has followed the same path of first building their user base on trust and quality and then monetizing it hard with various shady schemes.

Even coffee shops do it. First they sell high quality coffee for little margin and "don't expect or accept tips". Then they switch to the dark side to monetize the trust: they cut hard on materials, they pay $2/hour to employees and expect the customers to subsidize their minimum wages with tips (that are now accepted and very much expected).

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

#618

Post by efreak »

jquast wrote: post #67
dmw_ng wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bottom line is they optimize installation time by amortizing it out over the runtime life of the package, or in other words, optimizing a one time 15 second process to be a 14 second process, in return for making a many-times 1 second process a 30 second process. It makes absolutely no sense. They do this using a filesystem originally designed for embedded devices, using a driver hacked to disable threading suppo…

> On-demand decompression like this has made very little sense on desktops since the mid 90s Ok, maybe not desktops? But ZFS on-disk compression is a sysadmin's frickin dream -- just one example that you can access logfiles with plaintext tools like grep while benefiting from the space savings with neglible cost, LZ4 has basically no overhead at all, https://www.servethehome.com/the-case-for-using-zfs-compress... I r…

Can't you just alias cat to zcat and so on? There should be such tools available for just about everything that isn't a container format (zip, 7z, tar).

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

#619

Post by alrs »

indigodaddy wrote: post #234
alrs wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ehhhh, I've never seen a hardcore Linux developer move to Windows. WSL exists to sunset Windows-based development, not the other way around. Windows Server gets to exist so long as it acts as a funnel into Azure. Someday it will be sold off to Wipro, a la VMS or OS/2.

Windows Server won’t be getting “sold off.” I’m not sure you understand just how entrenched Windows Server is in the Enterprise and just about every Fortune 500 company out there, including huge telecoms and ISPs. MS still makes a ton of money off Server, and most of the companies/Enterprise using Server aren’t even thinking about Azure.

This is exactly the argument that was being made about Netware in 1994, or OS/2 in 1996, or Solaris in 2005.

I'm well aware of how important Windows Server was in the enterprise, and I'm aware of how far it has fallen.

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

#620

Post by efreak »

majewsky wrote: post #189
GekkePrutser wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft did have a choice. They could simply have hidden the disable auto update (and telemetry for that matter!) somewhere deeper in the OS where non-techie users will never find it. Or even a registry key or whatever.

Windows has a long history of tech-illiterate users downloading optimizer tools from shady websites that mess with registry keys and break stuff in surprising ways. And it's always Microsoft who gets the blame, not the shady utility. From that POV, I can understand Microsoft being reserved about gating this kind of stuff behind registry keys. These days, you can only do this stuff with group policies if I'm not mista…

Isn't group policy applied by changing registry keys? I've never actually looked it up, but I've always been under the impression that group policy changes just update registry keys that are checked by other software/parts of the os, and that the only advantage to using it (in a non-domain environment) is that it's the official way of doing it.
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