I did find it particularly annoying when I upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04 and seemed to duplicate applications. Adding a snap version side by side with my old applications.
Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages
401–410 of 538 posts
Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
Taking power away from users to address that inconvenience may be the status quo in the proprietary software industry, but it's totally over the line for user-respecting FOSS software. Not least because, once a developer acquires that power over users they very frequently succumb to the temptation to abuse their userbase as involuntary beta testers for half-baked bullshit which users struggle to opt-out of.
Taking power away from the users and putting it in the hands of upstream maintainers is pretty bad, but putting it in the hands of distro maintainers is even worse in my experience. Upstream maintainers are at least the people who develop the software directly and deal with the bug reports.
Traditionally, distro maintainers do not take this power over users for themselves.
Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
let me clear some things up and tell me if I am wrong, link me to the correction and I will apologize. - Mint uses Ubuntu repositories - Canonical pushes the changes they want into this repos, this changes are probably done by scripts that build source code on Canonical servers. - the Ubuntu repos also contain binary blobs - when a Mint user does an update he gets the binary directly from Canonical servers, there is…
>when a Mint user does an update he gets the binary directly from Canonical servers When I update Mint binaries, I get them from one of about 30 mirrors which Mint enables me to choose. (Or it will decide for me based on speed.) Do the mirrors at Clarkson, Harvard, Purdue, UW, etc belong to Canonical? I think not. Nor does most of the code the binaries are built from. Canonical has made its choice, Clem's made his.
Mirrors are just mirrors, they are not build farms that build from source.
I would convert the next sentence in math logic and prove you that it makes no sense but not sure you can understand the symbols so let me try again in English.
1 Mint does not trust Canonical
2 Mint plugs their users systems directly to Canonical untrustworthy repos to run possible "evil" binaries and scripts as root.
if 1 and 2 are true then as a user you should not use Mint, as a Mint developer you should start working and finally create an independent distribution.
IMO 1 is false, probably they mentioning "trust" was a mistake.
Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages
#404From 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…
I kind of hate snap. I thought the flatpak idea was OK but snap just feels intrusive.
Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
Snap can't seem to access my mounts. They're not very special mounts, but it happens in linux that you mount something, but snap just won't access. That made "no-go" a no-brainer.
I have the same problem. Snaps are confined to only files within $HOME. I keep almost all data under /media/ and this caused snaps to be mostly unusable for me, at least unusable for productivity apps where I need to process data. Some apps though are self contained, e.g. Spotify, for example, works fine for me as a snap. The limitation stems from a design problem, details at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source…
Yup. There needs to be considerable work to integrate snaps from completely sandboxed (no access to file system/network/hardware), to giving them controlled access to some resources, managed/monitored by root and/or user.
Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
Debian has a lot of rules, some of which prevent statically linked binaries, like Go programs, from being packaged and shipped with it. A notable example is lxd. Appimages are great but there's no sandboxing or updates. But hey, we used to downlad debs and install them by hand on Debian 1.3, before apt was a thing. Maybe appimages could be signed and distributed in a similar fashion.
Go also supports dynamic linking actually.
Unfortunately even micro releases of the Go compiler break ABI, so Go dynamic linking isn't feasible for distros to use:
Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages
#407From 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...)
You'd use docker instead of snaps on a server typically. Snaps are completely redundant there.
Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages
#408Anyone using Snap to get more up-to-date versions of packages might be interested in trying out Guix package manager on "foreign distro". Has a lot of free (as in freedom) software in latest or close to latest versions ready to install and I find myself using it more and more.
Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages
#409Snaps 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…
My calculator is now the plain Python interpreter
Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
The differences are the following: * Nonfree software is generally demarcated as such. There is nonfree software that has available source (in the case of some codecs), other that comes as blobs. * The Chromium package is open source, and in most distros comes as binary built from the toolchain set up by the package maintainers. In all free software distros if you don't want to download the binary, you can download t…
You are making my point, the "trust" is not the issue , the issue is "control". Canonical has the control on the snap store and Mint can insert their customization on top. Again, if Canonical is evil and can't be trusted why I would run Mint? Do the developers run any scripts to alert me if Canonical slips some bad thing in a binary? I think is fine if they remove snaps but IMO is stupid to accuse Canonical to be evi…
> Again, if Canonical is evil and can't be trusted why I would run Mint?
Rational self-interest. I don't think the tech giants are good for society, but not working with them would mean slipping into irrelevance.
Say, I'm a game developer. Do I trust Microsoft? No. Do I sacrifice 90% of my profit to boycott Windows? No. There are different degrees of "evilness", and the scale does matter, too.