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Why is there only one Snap Store?

merlijn.sebrechts.be

251–260 of 362 posts

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#251

It's not for nothing that Snap is considered dangerous by SUSE and is not officially supported. They even fail basic upstream responsibilities. https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3906 > A year later, in the Ubuntu 20.04 package base, the Chromium package is indeed empty and acting, without your consent, as a backdoor by connecting your computer to the Ubuntu Store. Applications in this store cannot be patched, or pinned.…

> 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. This is not entirely correct. Distributions can use a "brand store" to have complete control over which packages their users get. > You can’t audit them Many Snaps contain a build manifest in `/snap/snap-name/current/snap/manifest.yaml`. This manifest contains a log of every…

> This is not entirely correct. Distributions can use a "brand store" to have complete control over which packages their users get.

By “you” I assume they are referring to users, not distributions.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#252
post #219
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Linux is fantastic for that, until you come across a use case that is outside those typical bounds. Say your mom decides she likes photography one day and decides to buy a camera and take some lessons. Say her teacher says "we use lightroom and photoshop so you'll need to have these because they're industry standard" and she has no idea what to do and why the Adobe CC launcher won't load on Linux. Then she'll cal…

That is a real problem, but in my opinion unrelated to whether an OS is "ready for the desktop". That's just a business problem, not a technical problem: Adobe cares about platforms where the money is. It's not a technical problem because people like my mom can learn to use GIMP (note: people who use photo editing software are "pros" of a kind, anyway; "regular" users don't know how to edit photos, either) or Krita o…

>That is a real problem, but in my opinion unrelated to whether an OS is "ready for the desktop". That's just a business problem, not a technical problem: Adobe cares about platforms where the money is.

Only back in the day part of the idea around "Linux for the Desktop" was that everybody would use the "better" FOSS programs, and not wait for MS/Adobe/Autodesk/Avid/etc.

But, as you note, this hasn't happened, and "even if you fix GIMP's UX issues, it's still not Photoshop or Lightroom".

>But that's not what being ready for the desktop is about. That's not what a desktop is for most people, either.

Well, pragmatically the desktop is a Windows machine, which just works, doesn't require them to think long and hard about which cpu/memory/laptop/peripherals/etc to buy, has drivers for all of their devices, has all kinds of apps they might use (beyond email and web), and so on.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be completely honest, if Canonical ever wants the theoretical "year of the Linux desktop" to happen, they need a way to get proper cloud accounts working. A big part of the value of Apple's ecosystem is iCloud. Microsoft has done the same thing with the syncing and cross platform capabilities of their Microsoft Accounts. Most Linux users today don't care much if they need to create separate email, cloud storage, b…

For my money, the year of the Linux Desktop was 2008. It's just that nobody noticed. Since 2008, Linux has had the best combination of performance and hardware support on older machines, and the advantage has only grown since then. Windows and MacOS keep falling further behind in usability on machines older than four years, and that's the only hardware I would purchase for personal use. Why throw your money away on p…

I am not quite sure it was that early, but I agree it is in the past. Specifically, I contend that the year of the Linux desktop was some time before 2015, when Microsoft made (a version of) Windows (10) available gratis.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#254
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pollute your mount list and make your software start way slower and take up more space. Also sometimes break or require intervention for basic operation due to security restrictions on it. The benefits are supposed to be that they're more secure, more portable, and don't junk up your system with files strewn everywhere. Personally I'm waiting for a better solution than anything we've seen so far for the first of thos…

Note that the sandboxing security theater of flatpak and snap etc is largely just that. You can have very secure deb packages by having default-deny apparmor rules. This is basically how Android works, it just asks you to grant the permissions in real time (and uses a frankenmix of custom Google fu Android Java API and selinux). You can also use cgroups to control kernel feature access like devices, networking, perip…

>You can have very secure deb packages by having default-deny apparmor rules.

Nobody would do this on a desktop because it is massively inconvenient to go through every single app you want to run and debug which app armor rule that it's violating. Even when running a service with a pre-written app-armor profile you usually have to spend a while to figure out what the hell went wrong.

Flatpak's sandboxing is a complete joke and is entirely voluntary. Snaps have sane and granular permissions interfaces that you can easily toggle on and off. Canonical is actually enforcing auto-connect rules for the more potentially dangerous ones in their store. If you want to get a classic confined app in the store, it actually has to be approved by their security team.

These things are GREAT for security, which, to be quite frank, is a complete fucking disaster on Linux desktop. X11 is a massive security hole, no real mandatory access control, no sandboxing for apps, local privilege escalations out the wazoo, a quadrillion open security bugs in the kernel. Sure, you can try and set these things yourself, but that relies on the USER to properly configure these things, and if you don't know exactly what you're doing and screw it up (and there are no reliable, consistent guides on how to do these things), then you're just as insecure as you were before.

We're just fortunate that Linux on desktops aren't popular enough to be targeted, because we'd just be getting constantly owned thanks to this massively outdated security model. Windows is actually doing the security model a whole lot better these days, but their popularity and their tendency to implement them poorly and with bypasses to preserve backwards compatibility kind of cancels that benefit out.

It's a real shame that snaps have not taken off. If flatpak wins, and they don't massively overhaul the damned thing to actually add some semblance of sandboxing with permissions controlled by the user, then we're doomed.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look up how you type: those • characters I used in my post, an m-dash (—), a c-cedilla (ç), a german double-S (ß), basic accented characters for various Western European languages No thanks! I already new how to type — (Compose - - -), and I was able to guess how to type the others simply by trial and error in less time than it would take to duck/google how to type them: Compose + . + - → · (close enough for me Edi…

Great! Linux, I assume? goes looking OK yep, I'll enable it and start re-training myself on that, for when I'm not on mac. It's not quite as quick for most of the things I need frequently, but seems tolerable. Remaining questions: 1) why would the default be bad? Like, why ever would one make a default bad if there are non-bad options? Especially for something everyone should want to be good on a computer, like compo…

1) why would the default be bad? Like, why ever would one make a default bad if there are non-bad options?

Because it is not bad, it just chooses different advantages and disadvantages.

Right Alt could be configured to do regular Alt modifier, or could be configured to enter additional characters (Alt Gr - third/fourth level).

The first case has advantage that Alt-based keyboard shortcuts on right side can be conveniently entered by one hand. That is why there are Shift, Control and Alt on both sides of keyboard.

Second case has advantage that you can enter more characters, but entering rightside Alt-based shortcuts is more awkward.

Conventionally, US keyboard uses the first approach (as there are less need for entering more characters), while many non-US keyboards use the second approach.

Also, why Compose key is not accessible by default? Because there is no Compose key on common PC keyboard (in constrast to some old Unix keyboards). Therefore, Compose key need to 'steal' some existing key, which is problematic, because users expect existing keys to work as expected. I personally use Menu key as Compose key, but other users may have different expectations.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Launchpad is also objectively more complex and hard to use than alternatives, and subjectively I'd say it's ugly and looks dated. Launchpad isn't probably something people want to use because of product design, and thus there's not much activity around it outside of Canonical. I think it would be silly to assume that a separate project that is liked wouldn't get traction outside of Canonical because of their experien…

> Launchpad is also objectively more complex and hard to use than alternatives, and subjectively I'd say it's ugly and looks dated Launchpad is _really_ old though. When it was open sourced, there were very few alternatives and those were often even more complex and harder to use. I think part of the reason why it was almost never used was because it does so much: project management, bug trackers, build service, pack…

Launchpad actually predates Ubuntu :) A lot of the methodologies and practices used to develop it (both good and bad) didn't even get names until years later. I even hear monoliths are becoming fashionable again.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#258
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was excited for Ubuntu Core and then "noped" out as soon as I saw the Ubuntu SSO account requirement. I'm not going to use an OS that you can't login to without it phoning home to a third party.

You realize that's literally just to fetch SSH keys, right? It's the authentication method so they don't have to provide a default password. It's not some sort of phone-home method.

I, like GP, noped out as soon as I saw the SSO requirement. I also noped out of Microsoft's /free/ embedded offing for the same reason.

I don't care why it's needed. I'm not interested in voluntarily tying my business to your product if you're going to restrict access to it this early on.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#259

That reminds me of the stake Ubuntu Core was born with in its heart: > An Ubuntu SSO account is required to create the first user on an Ubuntu Core installation. They just keep flinging shit at nothing and hoping to hit a wall they can build a gate in. They're trying to boil the frog slowly with Snap on the Server/Desktop branches. There is no possible genuine motive for these maneuverings to be in the position of ga…

> If anyone at Canonical is listening, you should be aware it doesn't matter how slowly and carefully you approach this, or how you justify it, the first time I'm forced to kiss the ring to get my software to work, your software is gone from any system I own or manage, immediately and forever. They're taking a look at how Microsoft is slowly doing this with Windows, and following suit.

That's not the only thing they copied unfortunately. Snap force update after a while and there is no proper way to stop it.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just a release date issue. It matters (to me, at least) that Canonical was doing it's thing, RH invents something shortly after that trounces Canonical, Canonical makes futile attempts to save the ship before finally dumping the project. For example, Upstart. RH invents SystemD, Canonical stays with Upstart until, like, 2017 before giving up.

Wasn't it Canonical creates Upstart, switches Ubuntu to it, RH switches to it; a few years later, RH creates SystemD, RH switches to it, Ubuntu switches to it?

Ubuntu didn't switch to systemd. Debian switched to systemd, and Ubuntu had to follow or pretty much drop Debian as its upstream.
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