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Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

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Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#501

Post by Sir_Substance »

still_grokking wrote: post #138
lawl wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but from the User perspective it seems like FlatPaks[1] are much better and address the issues that this article raises This is interesting, because the last few days I was actually working on packaging an application of mine as a snap/flatpak. From my PoV, they both have their fair share of issues. Snaps enforce a sandbox, which I think is actually a good idea, because the desktop security model is somewhat broken…

As a user I don't like neither Snaps (that for sure as this is Cannonical only) nor FlatPaks (as they seem conceptually a "80% solution" which combines the problems of package systems with the problems of self-contianed apps, but don't improve on anything). For me the only acceptable solution besides proper .debs are AppImages. AppImage doesn't try to "replace" the package management for desktop apps like the former…

I also prefer appimages as the "least worst" of the three.

However, a quick note: As someone who unofficially maintains a linux port of my companies software, I have considered packaging it as an appimage, but there's one problem with appimages that kills the concept.

Appimages are read-only[1]. I'd love to package my companies product that way, but we already have update-delivery infrastructure that works on windows and mac (and linux), and it assumes it can write to the "install folder". Changing the entire update infrastructure specifically for an OS we don't officially support is a non-starter.

From a developer perspective, I would love the ability to update an appimage's contents in place. However, as a user I'd also like the ability to set it read-only to block updates if I desire. Flatpak's mandatory updates are one of the key reasons I dislike it. Never the less, if the goal is to smooth the path for proprietary software to support linux without making half a dozen different packaging solutions, in place updates need to be supported.

[1] edit: according to comments below, they now have an update mechanism, but it's still a totally appimage-specific process, so my problem remains :/

Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#502

Post by berkes »

madeofpalk wrote: post #83
berkes wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better even: design it to be self-hostable from scratch. Edit: by making it a self-contained executable, a .deb or even a set of ansible scripts. I understand that some complex interconnected ball-of-spaghetti of microservices makes little sense to open-source, b/c no-one can run it. But that is essentially saying: we never wanted people to run it themselves, and now we are at a point that no-one can run it, so why b…

Sure, there's "even better" ways to go above what they did, but it seems to be than an open source company would at least by default develop open source software. They had to have actively chosen to build this closed-source software, no.

I agree entirely.

My point was only that I expect an company like Canonical to not just open source everything, but to design it in such a way that it is useful for third parties.

To make the distinction with "open source waste", where companies Open Source the software they no longer want, maintain or monetize.

Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#503

Post by philliphaydon »

fullstop wrote: post #443
philliphaydon wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going to fire this up in a VM now and give it a go, maybe replace Ubuntu 20.04 with it. I just tried out Mint but it installs SO much rubbish. It installs mysql?!? I don't mind it installing some useful software but Mint goes overboard. With 20.04 I'm constantly sitting at 20-27gb of used memory when doing dev work.

One thing which I very much liked about it is that the installer takes care of luks / cryptsetup.

OH. Pop!_OS is awesome. Thanks a lot!

Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#504

Post by andrewshadura »

boring_twenties wrote: post #117
andrewshadura wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would anyone use this instead of distro packages?

Distros (at least Debian and Ubuntu) don't package Oracle Java AFAIK.

Oracle Java cannot be packaged or used in any but personal setup, and there’s no need for it these days when OpenJDK is the official Java implementation.

Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#505

Post by andrewshadura »

alyandon wrote: post #128
andrewshadura wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would anyone use this instead of distro packages?

The short story is - developers typically need to target more than one version of Java and the long lifetime of LTS releases don't line of up very well with that. Canonical historically provided a single "system" version of Java (meaning any system packages that depends on Java depended on this package) which meant that that was the version of Java that you got with Ubuntu XX.XX - even for LTS releases which had a 5…

Ubuntu provides Java the same way as Debian does, enabling applications to run with any compatible Java implementation. There is one version which gets pulled by default, but you can totally switch to a different one.

Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#506

Post by mixmastamyk »

rotterdamdev wrote: post #487

How come Debian can package chromium but Ubuntu cannot?

> Google tracks you even in incognito via AdSense. There is an EU case on it. It's just snakeoil.

(Replying here because your comment I quoted above is dead! Vouching didn't help. Must have made someone mad.)

I don't believe the very few sites (mostly work related) I use chromium with have adsense, but it is possible here and there.

Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#507

Post by sergeykish »

Avamander wrote: post #500
sergeykish wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a lot (npm, cargo, docker, ipython, elinks, gnupg, freecad, ...) already support XDG or may be configured with environment variables [0]: export ELINKS_CONFDIR="$XDG_CONFIG_HOME"/elinks [0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/XDG_Base_Directory

It should be the default that my home folder isn't cluttered. I have tens and tens of pieces of software, it's very impractical to keep track what does what and if I have to get them to behave somehow. That export list required got me weary, plus look at how many in that list are hardcoded :/, the situation is rather bad.

You can patch it all.

If world does not match your view it may be you who is outlier. I quite like current convention - hidden files in $HOME belong to applications. There is value in $XDG_CACHE_HOME - it can be safely removed (like /var/cache).

You force your view on open source community, that is rather bad.

Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#508

Post by Quekid5 »

dorfsmay wrote: post #442
Quekid5 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...)

Have you picked which distro yet?

Not too seriously, but it kind of depends on the project which $OTHER_DISTRO we'll go with, I think.

Debian stable is an obvious choice for projects that don't rely on too much "new stuff" because we already have a lot of stuff that uses APT, deb repositories, etc. Otherwise, probably CentOS/RHEL for those situations that are just ultra-averse to incremental change and prefer a HUGE change once every 5-10 years.

I think we might become a bit more adventurous and move to e.g. NixOS for "newer" projects. That's probably going to have to be trialed for a few projects before we go all in on it, but it seems really nice for servers (and dev machines for that matter), but it'll be interesting to see if you have to truly go all in to reap the benefits. (The worry here would be the amount of upstream 'support' in terms of manpower to bring in security updates, etc.).

(I'm also vaguely aware of SuSE, but I only spent a very brief period of time with it about 10-15 years ago and don't really remember any distinctive features either way. Which is kinda weird, because it seems to be known as the 'popular in Europe' distro?)

Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#509

Post by Quekid5 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #407
Quekid5 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I personally would avoid docker, but 'containers', yes.

> Snaps are completely redundant there.

Yes, they certainly are but it seems to be harder and harder to get rid of snapd. It's probably not going to be an actual issue for Focal, but it's about this trend... Maybe Canonical will see sense -- who knows?

Meanwhile, I do have to at least have a broad plan for the next 2-5 years, so...

Re: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

#510

Post by franga2000 »

bayindirh wrote: post #498
franga2000 wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the 'originals' work always better in the long run Except that normal people can actually install Manjaro and it doesn't make you use AUR for pretty basic things. Except that Ubuntu actually doesn't shit itself almost every time you add a 3rd party package/repo and comes with reasonable defaults. Also, have you used Pop OS? Your statement is quite simply untrue.

> Except that Ubuntu actually doesn't shit itself almost every time you add a 3rd party package/repo and comes with reasonable defaults. I'm using debian testing for more than 15 years and it never shit itself for a 3rd party repo. Debian comes with whathever the original software developers set as the default sans the wallpaper. For sensible default you can bug the software developer in question, not debian.

Maybe the situation is different on the server side or I've just been extremely unlucky, but I keep getting my packages broken. Just a few days ago I was installing Wireguard on a Stretch system (added unstable repo, lowest priority, pinned packages) and APT got tangled up to the point where I couldn't install almost anything because one package was too new, but trying to remove it went down the dependency tree all the way to `util-linux` and I had to do surgery with `dpkg -r --force-depends` to fix it.
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