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Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

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Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#251

Post by trabant00 »

pjfin123 wrote: post #84

If 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…

> If desktop Linux is ever going to be mainstream

I do not want that to be the target. Going mainstream never helped with the quality of anything. Quite the contrary: mainstream means lowest common denominator.

If you want to compromise on how much you control of your desktop os for more vendor support you already have windows and macos.

Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#252

Post by tssva »

_jal wrote: post #62
ncr100 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you - :) Reading about the cons of Snap now - "auto-updates cannot be turned off" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_(package_manager)

Yep. One of many reasons they're banned in our shop. Even for client software it is bad - an app quitting out from under me because it wants to update is functionally equivalent to a crashing bug - but they're offering daemons this way, which is just insane. Who doesn't want all their containers randomly restarting because someone up the distro chain decided when your machine needed to upgrade? https://snapcraft.io/l…

If snap decides to update lxd on the nodes of your lxd cluster at the same time that a node has failed it is a CF.

The cluster will not come up because your down node is now not the same version as the other cluster nodes.

Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#253

Post by the_af »

kd913 wrote: post #206
the_af wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like Linux Mint is doing the same? There is no control being lost by using Ubuntu versus Mint. If I understood the issue correctly (and I may very well be mistaken!) the problem Mint has with Canonical is that Ubuntu has "hijacked" (for lack of a better term) some apt packages so that they now actually install snapd and the snap. So you think you're opting out of snap, but when you use apt to install Chromium you e…

There is no apt package with Chromium. https://ubuntu.com/blog/chromium-in-ubuntu-deb-to-snap-trans... Canonical couldn't afford the maintenance costs for it. On Ubuntu distributions it's either the snap or you have to create some weird frankendeb aspect by pulling from Debian. They explained it better than I would. In other cases, I don't think of a case where apt installs snaps over apt. I think the only priority f…

Oh. If there is no Chromium apt package, isn't the following from TFA (lwn) misleading?

> The problem was the decision to change the Ubuntu chromium-browser APT package itself upstream in Ubuntu. Previously, that package would simply install Chromium directly. With the change, it would instead install the Snap package-management tools first and then install the Snap equivalent of the Chromium package — without making it clear to the user what was happening.

Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#254

Post by esclerofilo »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #178
pjfin123 wrote: post #84

If 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…

> If 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 If this is what you're looking for out of a computer, then why not just use a phone, tablet, or something like ChromeOS?

Because there are lots of things a computer can do comfortably that a phone, tablet or chromebook can't.

Sometimes there can be tradeoffs between convenience and security, but in the case of an app store the convenience actually enhances the security, because it diminishes the chance of people running random harmful commands from the Web.

Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#255

Post by m4rtink »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #228
m4rtink wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appimage has its own issues though: - no update mechanism - no sandboxing and only basic app isolation - no deduplication (Flatpak automatically deduplicates everything it installs on a machine)

AppImages do have an update mechanism: https://docs.appimage.org/packaging-guide/optional/updates.h...

Interesting! That must be something relatively new, as it at least looked like there was nothing back then when I looked up Appimage.

Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#256

Post by mixmastamyk »

Avamander wrote: post #236
boring_twenties wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

~/snap is really just wholly unacceptable, how did that even become a thing? Do the people who develop this software never use their own systems?

I have no nice words about the person who thought that folder is acceptable to use. Seriously, what the fuck even?

It's definitely irritating but I consider the root daemon the primary offender. Kill it with fire!

Oh, forgot to mention: /var/cache/snapd/

Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#257

Post by dTal »

Darmody wrote: post #211

Just today I switched from Ubuntu to Pop_OS (I hate that name). Unity was giving me some trouble as it's starting to conflict with all the newer stuff so I had to make a decision. I dislike Gnome Shell. It's clean and fast but the GUI is "locked" to the main monitor and I can't even switch windows without looking at it. But I love how the distro is made focusing on a good user experience. To give you an example, the…

https://support.system76.com/articles/desktop-environment/

I don't use Pop!_OS, but I recommend Plasma.

Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#258

Post by anthk »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #59
jrockway wrote: post #6

I've been kind of disappointed by Snap. It seemed like it was a way to always have the latest version of software you care about available, but in practice, nobody updates their Snaps. I used it to get a newer version of Go, and while it is more recent than what comes with Ubuntu, it's still not the latest version. Apparently Some Guy updates it on a volunteer basis when he remembers, so it's nearly useless. Even if…

> 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…

>Linux has settled on this middelmen-everywhere way of doing things,

BSD ports had it before. And before that, Irix machines had the packages split in several CDs.

Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#259

Post by dTal »

jefft255 wrote: post #23

I wonder if it is finally time for me to give Arch a try. It's a shame that all my lab's machines run Ubuntu; although I find it solid, this sort of controlling behavior by Canonical seems against the spirit of FOSS.

I would recommend anyone considering Arch to skip straight to Void. It's "like Arch", but it addresses a number of pain points - specifically, its binary repositories are much larger, and its package manager won't let you break the system with incomplete upgrades like pacman will (on Arch, anything short of a complete system upgrade every time you install any package is not guaranteed not to lead to breakage, whereas xbps tracks shared libraries).

Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#260

Post by dilandau »

kd913 wrote: post #169
dilandau wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>snapd not open-source. Red herring. The Linux Mint teams' main complaints have to do with issues around the way snap wrests control from the user. >I will remind people that the most popular PPA to this day is a Java PPA being run by some 3rd party that doesn't offer Java. That PPA has root access to thousands of machines. Imagine strawman-ing this hard.

>Red herring. The Linux Mint teams' main complaints have to do with issues around the way snap wrests control from the user. Like Linux Mint is doing the same? There is no control being lost by using Ubuntu versus Mint. I could remove snapd there without people making that decision for me. Worse would be Mint's decision of removing the only FOSS built version of chromium without offering an alternative in place. Cano…

Another red herring, and also moving the goalposts.

Quit shilling.

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