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Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

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Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#241

Post by zentiggr »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #98
zentiggr wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a laptop that I'm planning on rebuilding from a failed NTFS/Win10 system to Linux something. Now I know it's not going to be Ubuntu or anything else derived from Canonical.

> Now I know it's not going to be Ubuntu or anything else derived from Canonical. Why avoid Ubuntu derivates like Mint or Pop!_OS, though? They're doing the heavy lifting of fighting Canonical on this issue. Maybe using one of those distros instead of vanilla Ubuntu actually strengthens the pressure that Canonical feels on this topic.

Fair point, but honestly I'm in the "don't have enough time to Gentoo this build" category.

If I know I can avoid Snap crap by changing distros for now, that's what I have a timeslice for.

Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#242

Post by Quekid5 »

psanford wrote: post #7

From 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…

You absolutely nailed it and this is why -- if I have any say in this (and I do) -- we will be moving away from Ubuntu.

It's a completely insane stance for server systems. (I believe it's still possible to run server systems without snaps with various "workarounds" etc, but we can feel which way the wind is blowing...)

Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#243

Post by emerongi »

CSDude wrote: post #234
emerongi wrote: post #220

Snaps are super laggy. GNOME calculator on Ubuntu runs in a snap and it is baffling that whoever made the decision to package it in a snap by default was OK with the fact that it takes 2 seconds to launch a basic calculator on a 2017 laptop (edit: re-tested, it took 5 seconds). To top it off, a couple months ago my calculator disappeared. For some reason I have been having problems with snap applications disappearing…

I think it's because they extract compressed rootfs tar each time to be mounted in LXC container. Even with a beefy computer, it takes considerable time.

What is weird to me is that apparently there has not been someone in a position of power in this project that would go "Wait guys, this is not good. Any other ideas? How can we improve?"

No, just roll on with it.

There was a period of time, around 2010-2015 when I really felt that computers were fast. SSDs were getting more affordable and that was a huge improvement, every action was immediately responsive. In 2020, that has somehow been undone. It takes 5 seconds to launch a calculator. Software guys really like to undo all the advances that the hardware guys are doing.

Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#244

Post by Symbiote »

rootbear wrote: post #163

I dislike how snap clutters up my df listings. I have to pipe them through grep to get rid of the noise: df -h | grep -v /snap An option to ls to suppress all loopback mounts might be a nice option.

  alias df='df --exclude-type=tmpfs --exclude-type=devtmpfs --exclude-type=squashfs'

Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#245

Post by zentiggr »

Endeavourist wrote: post #134
zentiggr wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a laptop that I'm planning on rebuilding from a failed NTFS/Win10 system to Linux something. Now I know it's not going to be Ubuntu or anything else derived from Canonical.

Why not EndeavourOS? It's based on Arch Linux, with minimal numbers of external packages; quite unlike Manjaro actually. You can just treat it as a standard Arch install, and even use the ISO to boot with wi-fi drivers and all and install Arch plainly, without the non-wifi and other regrets. EndeavourOS is pretty great; I personally use it as a live-ISO (XFCE environment) and just install Arch from within the live En…

Hadn't heard the name but glad I did. I was going to look for a live CD distro with good NTFS read support for the old drive recovery. This sounds good.

Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#246

Post by esclerofilo »

commoner wrote: post #80
red_admiral wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how hard it would be, in theory, to write an open-source "cracked" version of snap that lets you do these things.

The Snap server is closed source, so this would require building an open source Snap server as well. At this point, it would be much simpler to use Flatpak or some other solution.

I hate snap as much as anyone, but it may not be as hard as you think: " rel="nofollow">https://ubuntu.com/blog/howto-host-your-own-snap-store>

Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#247

Post by etskinner »

heavyset_go wrote: post #216
psanford wrote: post #7

From 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…

My favorite anecdote about Snap is the development team's opinion when it comes to users wishing to relocate their ~/snap directory elsewhere. It's a commonly requested feature and being able to move it would follow the Freedesktop.org spec, but the developers don't care.

What's stopping someone from doing:

$ ln -s /somewhere-else ~/snap

Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#248

Post by tankenmate »

danudey wrote: post #156
psanford wrote: post #7

From 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…

From an IT perspective: I can set up an internal APT mirror for my users, servers, test systems, etc., but I can't set up an internal snap mirror as far as I can tell. This means that despite having an internal repo that I can whitelist, some package installations will now arbitrarily require internet access. I can no longer install chromium on a system without access to the internet, and package installation will fa…

You might want to look at ungoogled-chromium,[0] there are downloads for most non Windows platforms. Also packages are available in repos for apt/deb, yum/rpm, etc.

[0] https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#249

Post by sascha_sl »

etskinner wrote: post #247
heavyset_go wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite anecdote about Snap is the development team's opinion when it comes to users wishing to relocate their ~/snap directory elsewhere. It's a commonly requested feature and being able to move it would follow the Freedesktop.org spec, but the developers don't care.

What's stopping someone from doing: $ ln -s /somewhere-else ~/snap

bind mounts

Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#250

Post by commoner »

esclerofilo wrote: post #246
commoner wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Snap server is closed source, so this would require building an open source Snap server as well. At this point, it would be much simpler to use Flatpak or some other solution.

I hate snap as much as anyone, but it may not be as hard as you think: " rel="nofollow">https://ubuntu.com/blog/howto-host-your-own-snap-store>

The difficult part is maintaining compatibility with snapd.

> snapstore was a minimalist example of a "store" for snaps, but is not compatible with the current snapd implementation. As a result I have removed the contents here to avoid further confusion.

https://github.com/noise/snapstore/

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