I usually go with Ubuntu on cloud platforms because it’s one of the defaults. Any suggestions on what’s a good alternative distributor go with that is widely supported and easily available on the variety of cloud platforms?
Debian
Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages
101–110 of 538 posts
Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages
#102Installed ubuntu 18.04, purged snapd. It was back after `do-release-upgrade` to 20.04
You need to write a bit of config to prevent it from being installed. See the apt_preferences manpage.
Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages
#103From the linked announcement: https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3906 > Applications in this store cannot be patched, or pinned. You can’t audit them, hold them, modify them or even point snap to a different store. You’ve as much empowerment with this as if you were using proprietary software, i.e. none. This is in effect similar to a commercial proprietary solution, but with two major differences: It runs as root, and it…
Is there no way to sandbox these packages - "have you cake and eat it too?" I'm a noob to modern Linux. Edit: Are snaps images? ...like containers? Edit 2: answer: > mounted dynamically by the host operating system, together with declarative metadata that is interpreted by the snap system to set up an appropriately shaped secure sandbox or container for that application
It seems to incorporate some novel ideas despite its obvious shortcomings.
I also think that so far Linux distributions have done very poorly when it came to cross-distribution/forward/backward compatibility of packages. This is a non-issue for popular Opensource packages since they can be easily packaged by the distributors. But not so popular packages sometimes need to be installed in a hacky way when they are not available for the target distribution. Even worse when dealing with commercial software, it can happen that it degrades with each distribution update.
Also I think that probably the package format will improve over time and add additional features, that would allow auditing for instance. Also with proper de-duplication (perhaps even on filesystem level) it should be possible to also deal with waste of space.
Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am honestly thinking the same thing. Still a bit hesitant as I mainly use Linux for work.
Same for me. ROS in particular only supports Ubuntu officially; although I know people can run it on Arch, it’s much more hacky and you have to build every package from source.
There are packages for ROS in the aur. And there are wrappers for the commands needed to install packages from AUR. To install ros on my system I just need to execute
pacaur -S ros-noetic-desktop-full In this case it will indeed compile the package with cmake. But there are also many binary packages on the aur. The user experience is not like Gentoo. I have never had problems finding a package with Arch.
Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages
#105Why do they base it on Ubuntu instead of Debian anyway?
To derive substantial value from software which is packaged specifically for Ubuntu but not Debian?
To have relatively up to date software without running unstable?
Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
But Mint are too lazy to build their own packages so they use Ubuntu binaries that are installed as root, this is IMO a PR move and a hypocrisy, if you don't trust Canonical don't use Mint use Debian or some distribution that has the capacity to host and build their binaries.
As long as you can audit the source and build chain what's the problem?
>As long as you can audit the source and build chain what's the problem?
As long as Linux Mint developers are not doing that how it helps you? you don't trust Canonical binaries but you trust the deb binaries, you could be honest and claim that you don't like snap but you still trust the deb binaries.
Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Some Guy updates it on a volunteer basis when he remembers Blame repo culture. In saner worlds there is no requirement for a middle man between developer and user, so users get the software when the developer releases it to them. For various reasons (only a few of which are technical), Linux has settled on this middelmen-everywhere way of doing things, and because it is FOSS all those middlemen are also volunteers…
It's not brain damage its a reaction to people being capable developers but crap at system engineering. I really don't want 187 system vulnerabilities from 12 apps which use different versions of different outdated libraries.
This is a solvable problem. The vast majority of "shared" libraries are used by exactly one application. Commonly used libraries like the system interface, cryptography, networking, and the widget set, should be provided by the base system and their ABIs kept stable.
Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages
#108The reason for why the backend for the snap store hasn't been opensourced has been explained multiple times. Namely that it would be expensive to open source it with little benefit in return. Canonical already spent a large amount of investment opensourcing launchpad and nobody other than them operate it. Mainly because the majority of the costs are for operating an instance which most other distros aren't willing to…
> Canonical already spent a large amount of investment opensourcing launchpad and nobody other than them operate it.
Launchpad has a weird user experience and was for a long time too much focussed on bazaar when git won.
At work we used bazaar and lp for a while, but still I always have to search for the right path for getting to a project's code. The bug tracker was more useful than GitHub's but that didn't help ...
Aside from that there are the legal implications of AfferoGPL which prevent many people from touching it.
But yes, doing infrastructures is hard. I however don't know how complicated hosting is and how well it's packaged. For software starting for in-house use this often is a mess ...
Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages
#109If desktop Linux is ever going to be mainstream there needs to be an easy to use "app store" where users can use a GUI to install apps which need to be sandboxed like on a mobile phone with defined permissions. Snapcraft is way ahead of Flatpak on this and the current Ubuntu setup works well. On Ubuntu you can go to the Ubuntu software app (gui) search for software and it blends apt results with snap results. This re…
Pop!_OS integrates flathub into their "app store" [0]
[0] https://blog.system76.com/post/616861064165031936/whats-new-...
Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages
#110If desktop Linux is ever going to be mainstream there needs to be an easy to use "app store" where users can use a GUI to install apps which need to be sandboxed like on a mobile phone with defined permissions. Snapcraft is way ahead of Flatpak on this and the current Ubuntu setup works well. On Ubuntu you can go to the Ubuntu software app (gui) search for software and it blends apt results with snap results. This re…
> On Ubuntu you can go to the Ubuntu software app (gui) search for software and it blends apt results with snap results.
GNOME Software and KDE Discover support both Flatpak and the distribution's native package manager together. For example implementations on Ubuntu-based distributions that work out of the box, see the elementaryOS AppCenter and the Pop!_OS Pop!_Shop: