Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

kevin-custer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 436 posts

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#101

Post by jasonjayr »

mulmen wrote: post #87
coolspot wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snap stores user-specific application data in /home/user/snap/ folder. Like when packaged application wants to write into $HOME, snap gives it some sub-folder inside /home/user/snap.

Ah ok I understand now. Sibling comments reference the MacOS Library and *NIX ~/.local approaches. Both of those seem to make a lot more sense. Is there a config for Snaps to store user data in a different path, like ~/.local/snap/?

No; they use some magic with security policies and mounts so $HOME/snap is hard coded. Some of the early comments in that "4 year old bug" linked here explain it.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#102

Post by RMPR »

teraflop wrote: post #30
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh, is it still impossible to disable Snap autoupdates? Even if people should be updating regularly, forcing them feels completely antithetical to the Linux ethos of users having control over their devices.

Props to Microsoft, for getting their approach to Windows updates adopted as an industry standard! /s

Next step, introduce the mandatory restart as a standard.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#103

Post by hvis »

coleifer wrote: post #49

Canonical always has tried to differentiate themselves, and they just can't execute. Remember Unity, Mir, Juju, upstart and all the other failed shit they've come out with? Snap is just more of the same. I don't want to run that garbage on my desktop. I don't need more daemons and forced auto-updates and all the baggage. I strongly recommend anyone similarly frustrated to check out debian, which is a fantastic distro…

Unity was very good in a lot of respects. Both its UI elements and its performance. Unfortunately, Unity 7 depended on Compiz somewhat heavily, and when it came to writing a replacement of the full stack, Canonical didn't manage to execute.

But have you been following last year's improvements to GNOME's performance and responsiveness? A lot of it is Canonical's devs bringing their experience from Unity.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#104

Post by temac »

simlevesque wrote: post #39
csdreamer7 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snaps have benefits. Canonical sells 5 year service subscriptions in addition to the 5 years they already offer for free on LTS. Snaps enable a way to get the latest VSCode and other apps on very old versions of Ubuntu. Snaps allowed me to try out Debian and Fedora with minimal issues and easily integrate them into my dotfile manager with Ansible.

The VSCode part is real. I had to install it on Ubuntu 17.04 a couple of weeks ago and it took me hours.

OTOH VS Code on a semi-old Debian 9 runs perfectly, from a regular .deb package and repository.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#105

Post by hvis »

AlexMax wrote: post #43

I wanted to like snaps (and flatpaks before then), because trying to ease packaging and deployment of apps on Linux is a noble goal, but in both cases I eventually gave up on non-trivial use of them because they were always broken in some annoying way because of their sandboxing. The latest snap I had to get rid of was Visual Studio Code, because I was trying to work on an open source game with it, and I found out th…

Snaps certainly have some usability problems. E.g. to use videoconferencing in Chromium I had to give it rights to connect to record audio explicitly.

I expect you needed to do something like that for the VS Code snap.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#106

Post by ckcheng »

brobinson wrote: post #72
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, for sure, but it's mildly annoying. Especially when a . is used to make the directory hidden, because I can't unhide that specific directory without changing the name apps expect.

You can press cmd-shift-g to open a "Go to folder" prompt which has some basic tab completion. This also works in file selection dialogs. Hopefully this saves someone as much time as it has saved me over the years. I get into the Library folder by doing: cmd-shift-g -> ~/Library -> enter

Cmd-shift-. will show hidden files and folders in the Mac Finder before Catalina.

In Catalina, it's now Cmd-shift-fn-.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250756110

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#107

Post by curt15 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #15
jaytaylor wrote: post #6

Kudos to the OP, I'm glad this got posted on hacker news because Snap is so ridiculously broken. Since 16.04, Snaps have been a huge pain for me with running LXC in production environments. By default, Snap applies updates and restarts Systemd services anytime it likes, and there's no way to turn this behavior off! The only way to get around it is to download the Snap package binary and install that directly. Then Sn…

Ugh, is it still impossible to disable Snap autoupdates? Even if people should be updating regularly, forcing them feels completely antithetical to the Linux ethos of users having control over their devices.

Yep: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-for...

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#108

Post by waltpad »

coleifer wrote: post #49

Canonical always has tried to differentiate themselves, and they just can't execute. Remember Unity, Mir, Juju, upstart and all the other failed shit they've come out with? Snap is just more of the same. I don't want to run that garbage on my desktop. I don't need more daemons and forced auto-updates and all the baggage. I strongly recommend anyone similarly frustrated to check out debian, which is a fantastic distro…

> I strongly recommend anyone similarly frustrated to check out debian, which is a fantastic distro.

It is true that the Debian people are doing a great job.

> [...] if you're using Ubuntu and disabling snap, you're fighting against the current and I have to imagine it's going to be increasingly difficult with subsequent releases.

Actually, snap was harder to remove in the previous release: you had to rebuild certain packages (actually, just pulseaudio, so it only matters for desktops) to get rid of the dependency, but it seems now that it's just a couple of apt commands, so you have to give Canonical credits for making it easier.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#109

Post by harry8 »

sour-taste wrote: post #99
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That’s a bit rich: are they not the #1 consumer distro, which hardly implies they are failing to execute All the hard work to make it a viable OS is done by Debian. Canonical just adds some polish and then wrecks it all with poor design decisions over and over again.

Then why doesn't everyone use Debian?

Because it's popular it gets 3rd party support. So people use it making it popular. Vicious/virtuous circle depending on whether you're looking at it from above or below.

Just like windows Shuttleworth admires and seeks emulate so very much.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#110

Post by ColanR »

sour-taste wrote: post #99
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That’s a bit rich: are they not the #1 consumer distro, which hardly implies they are failing to execute All the hard work to make it a viable OS is done by Debian. Canonical just adds some polish and then wrecks it all with poor design decisions over and over again.

Then why doesn't everyone use Debian?

Marketing?
Post reply on HN