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Ubuntu 23.04 – 'Lunar Lobster'

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Re: Ubuntu 23.04 – 'Lunar Lobster'

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly is wrong with snaps?

Slow, proprietary, auto update, sandboxed (which causes integration problems with other things). Solves a problem for Canonical and makes everyone else's life harder.

Sandboxing is a necessary evil - the Linux security model for applications installed on your computer is atrocious. The two main options we have to fix it are either a fine-grained capabilities model, or a coarse-grained sandboxing model - and the latter is an order of magnitude less work to implement.

However, Snaps do an impressively poor job of implementing a sandbox.

Re: Ubuntu 23.04 – 'Lunar Lobster'

#32

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…

Sandboxing still makes sense and is the right direction into a better Linux ecosystem. However the Ubuntu approach is flawed.

Re: Ubuntu 23.04 – 'Lunar Lobster'

#33
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's true for the store (Pop Shop), but not for the CLIs (apt and flatpak). If an app has only a .deb or flatpak version, it's not clear which will be installed. If there are multiple versions, you get a dropdown menu to select one. Unfortunately, some apps are listed more than once (different packagers, I assume).

Ubuntu, on the other hand, will sneakily install snaps via apt.

Re: Ubuntu 23.04 – 'Lunar Lobster'

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snap has been around for 8 years and during this time it got zero traction outside of Ubuntu. Canonical is known for axing their own projects eventually when they fail to get traction, so it seems pretty safe to assume that the writing is on the wall for snap.

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.

The difference is that Canonical forces the contributions ownership to be handed over, while RedHat plays by accepted opensource practices.

So while Canonical might have good initial ideas, the way they manage projects really kills them, e.g. snaps properly opensources might have been successful, instead they enforces the use of their proprietary server and ignore community requests (like moving /snap to /var/snap or making it configurable or allowing different servers/sources for snaps, while you can relatively easily make your own flatpak server and have users add the repo to their systems).

Re: Ubuntu 23.04 – 'Lunar Lobster'

#35
Canonical really seem to have lost their mojo. They've had a long-running tendency to forge on ahead regardless with fingers in ears, instead of listening to their userbase about what they actually want. Forcing snaps on users being a prime example of this behaviour. As a consequence, many users are jumping ship to other distros, and who can blame them?

In fact, I'm in the same camp. I'm imminently replacing a very nearly EOL 18.04 install with Arch. I've tried a non-trivial amount of distros over the course of my Linux days (since Fedora Core 5) and Ubuntu has probably seen the most install time over that period, but my time with Ubuntu is now at an end. Snaps suck.

Re: Ubuntu 23.04 – 'Lunar Lobster'

#36

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…

Similar boat, after about a decade on Kubuntu I switched to Manjaro, and there had been very little downsides (things like Postgresql major upgrade requires manual migration for example, which I didn't notice while updating the system) and a lot of advantages (or just one really, the AUR). Moving your right dotfiles (KDE ones are painful though) you can do the switch in less than a day and the change won't really be noticeable.

Re: Ubuntu 23.04 – 'Lunar Lobster'

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slow, proprietary, auto update, sandboxed (which causes integration problems with other things). Solves a problem for Canonical and makes everyone else's life harder.

Sandboxing is a necessary evil - the Linux security model for applications installed on your computer is atrocious. The two main options we have to fix it are either a fine-grained capabilities model, or a coarse-grained sandboxing model - and the latter is an order of magnitude less work to implement. However, Snaps do an impressively poor job of implementing a sandbox.

> Sandboxing is a necessary evil

Can you elaborate on the "necessary" part? I'm able to accomplish my computing goals without snaps.

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