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Ubuntu 23.04 – 'Lunar Lobster'

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Re: Ubuntu 23.04 – 'Lunar Lobster'

#21

Snaps are BS. I did couple of months ago clean ubuntu 22.10 install. Somehow curl was installed from snap - of course I had problem saving curled files due sandboxing. Installed mosquitto2 (MQTT server) - of course it did not read my custom confs from /etc/... anymore - due sandboxing. Installed Libreoffice from snap - it Calc (excel alternative) was exctremely slow somehow - switched to Libreoffice from APT repo - i…

I bailed after 20.04 and have been a happy Pop_OS (Ubuntu minus all the snaps out of the box), Fedora and Arch user ever since. Definitely try Pop as it's the most direct move from Ubuntu--really the only diff you'll notice is a different default system theme and background picture.

Re: Ubuntu 23.04 – 'Lunar Lobster'

#22
post #2

With 100% more snaps? No thanks.

What exactly is wrong with snaps?

They just don't offer the same user experience as deb packages did. Firefox has always been a deb and it was fine. Now, it's a snap, it has issues with external devices like smartcard readers and so, and I remember it telling you to close it before X days so it could update, but closing the browser made no difference (I eventually moved to the Firefox tarball to forget about all those issues so I'm not really sure how you were supposed to solve it). So, for me, it didn't offer any advantages over the deb package, but brought new headaches. Also, I don't really like much this new concept of packing all the application dependencies instead of working with shared libs.

And I'm not the one that criticizes Canonical just for seeking its own solutions, in fact, I liked things like Unity and Upstart. But for me, snaps came to solve a non-problem.

Re: Ubuntu 23.04 – 'Lunar Lobster'

#23
post #2

With 100% more snaps? No thanks.

What exactly is wrong with snaps?

For my use case, self-contained application formats (which includes snaps):

1. They don't scale, space-wise; libraries can take very considerable space

2. Permission issues

3. Configuration issues

4. Startup speed issues

Compared to a trusted (I stress "trusted") apt repository, for my use case, they have only downsides.

Re: Ubuntu 23.04 – 'Lunar Lobster'

#24

Snaps are BS. I did couple of months ago clean ubuntu 22.10 install. Somehow curl was installed from snap - of course I had problem saving curled files due sandboxing. Installed mosquitto2 (MQTT server) - of course it did not read my custom confs from /etc/... anymore - due sandboxing. Installed Libreoffice from snap - it Calc (excel alternative) was exctremely slow somehow - switched to Libreoffice from APT repo - i…

I bailed after 20.04 and have been a happy Pop_OS (Ubuntu minus all the snaps out of the box), Fedora and Arch user ever since. Definitely try Pop as it's the most direct move from Ubuntu--really the only diff you'll notice is a different default system theme and background picture.

Pop mixes flatpaks with regular packages and its very confusing to understand which is which

Re: Ubuntu 23.04 – 'Lunar Lobster'

#25
post #16

22.10 was pretty bogus on recent Intel machines, even the 12th generation Core but especially 13th. It was so bad I upgraded to development Lunar as soon as they landed a 6.x kernel. Have been very happy since then. 6.2 is a giant leap beyond 5.19.

For those seeking a recent kernel, it's not necessary to be on the latest Ubuntu - the kernel of the LTS version is synced with the latest non-LTS version, some time after the latter has been released.

Re: Ubuntu 23.04 – 'Lunar Lobster'

#27

Damn, i was wondering why is everyone still talking about snap and nobody is mentioning what I clearly remember reading recently, so i went back and looked for it and lo and behold the publishing day: https://news.itsfoss.com/ubuntu-ditch-snap/

Captain obvious here: look at the article's date.

Re: Ubuntu 23.04 – 'Lunar Lobster'

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Canonical’s defense, it seems like every time they try to do something innovative, Red Hat copies the idea and implements it slightly better. Upstart -> systemd Unity -> Gnome 3 Shell Mir -> Wayland Snaps -> flatpak I’m not saying Red Hat is wrong to do this, that’s the nature of healthy competition and we all benefit from this.

Weren't Wayland and flatpak first? And GNOME 3 as well? Unity was a reaction to GNOME 3's big changes. Either way, I agree that competition is better.

No. Snap started as a project and got useful before flatpak.

Wayland technically was before Mir, but existed as blueprints and ideas back then. Shuttleworth tried to influence its design for his vision of linux desktop, but got rejected, so Mir was created. Mir became useful way before first implementations of Wayland, but Shuttleworth idea to expand Mir and Ubuntu to phones resulted in feature creep, lack of funding and eventually to project failure.

Gnome shell was also released after Unity. Both were influenced by MacOS LaF. The problem with Unity was that it was based on gnome 2 and compiz, that was a good compositor back in the days, but a dead end as a technology, as compositor should’ve been implemented on a lower level and be an integral part of DE. Shuttleworth started Mir and new Unity based on that, but both sank and Ubuntu had to revert to gnome-shell that became useful and more performant than earlier versions.

Re: Ubuntu 23.04 – 'Lunar Lobster'

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Canonical’s defense, it seems like every time they try to do something innovative, Red Hat copies the idea and implements it slightly better. Upstart -> systemd Unity -> Gnome 3 Shell Mir -> Wayland Snaps -> flatpak I’m not saying Red Hat is wrong to do this, that’s the nature of healthy competition and we all benefit from this.

Weren't Wayland and flatpak first? And GNOME 3 as well? Unity was a reaction to GNOME 3's big changes. Either way, I agree that competition is better.

You’re right on all counts. My memory failed me on the order of those. Thanks for setting me straight!

Re: Ubuntu 23.04 – 'Lunar Lobster'

#30
post #2

With 100% more snaps? No thanks.

What exactly is wrong with snaps?

It's worth noting that, in addition to Snaps starting up slower (a common complaint on this thread), they actually cause the OS to boot up slower. Every Snap application adds a small amount of startup time. I think I shaved a third off my total time by removing a bunch of Snaps, which is atrocious, unacceptable, and unjustifiable.
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