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Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

techtudor.blogspot.com

101–110 of 198 posts

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#101

I think there are some very good critiques of snap (performance, provenance, reproducibility, namespacing, etc), and the first couple points in this article seem reasonable. However I can't agree with this: > apt/deb is a wonderful package management system and everyone is happy with it, at least the majority of Ubuntu/Debian users. Besides, dnf/rpm is also a similar packaging system for Fedora/RH systems and everyon…

What you want is static executables . It is sad that those are not typically packaged in dependence-free debs, but there's nothing really against it.

Yes, sign me up please! You don't necessarily need to go all the way down to statically linking libc, but if just about everything else could be included in the binary, that would be lovely.

We have come up with such convoluted solutions to this problem—Docker, nix, Snap, etc—when the simple option is sitting in front of us. And it works! On my Mac, I don't want to install homebrew or MacPorts—Package managers make me feel like I never know the state of my system—so when I need a command line tool, I try to either track down or otherwise compile (in a VM) a static binary. When I can find them, they work perfectly!

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#102
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If any Canonical employee is around here they should be taking notes or this will blow in their face like Upstart, Mir, Unity 8, etc. Or maybe Shuttleworth doesn't care at all and he just wants the big bucks from MS.

When they moved from Unity to Gnome shell, you could read all over the OMGUbuntu comments that people actually liked Unity and wished they would keep it. It's always the same, you hear people complaining the most. Ubuntu has been a success because they took some risk. The first one has been to make installing proprietary drivers easy. Something they got a lot of heat for. And since they managed to become the most pop…

I'm using Ubuntu 20.04 with Unity right now. Unity wasn't bad. I disliked it at first because it lacked features and it wasn't polished. After some time a lot of people started liking it.

But they messed up with Unity 8 and Mir. They didn't want to work with the community, they didn't care if they were working on stuff that already existed. Instead of working with the upstream devs, they worked alone. Where did they end up? Back to Gnome Shell with a lot of years of effort down the drain.

And this is even worse. More info here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23433794

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are parallels with the Gnome team's stance that "we know what's best for you", and that turns off a lot of linux users. There is a tension between those who wish to turn linux into Mac OS or Windows, and those who want fine-grained control over the workings of their computer. The arrogance of the gnome team and the snap apologists is a huge red flag to me. I don't use Ubuntu or Gnome, and I'm glad linux provide…

I find gnome to be pretty configurable. The opinionated defaults aren’t so bad because you can just replace the environment if you dislike it

How do you set the background colour in GNOME?

At least in the recent versions I've tested, you literally can't. You can only set it to an image.

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#104
post #19

Largest issue I have with Snap is that it appears to assume the owner of a system is not in best position to make choices for their own systems. Sure, this might be true for the average user, but it is toxic to the “super user” community that’s in the best position to help support the larger community and may end up pushing them away. Snap at the very least should have an opt-out feature, if not be opt-in during an i…

There are parallels with the Gnome team's stance that "we know what's best for you", and that turns off a lot of linux users. There is a tension between those who wish to turn linux into Mac OS or Windows, and those who want fine-grained control over the workings of their computer. The arrogance of the gnome team and the snap apologists is a huge red flag to me. I don't use Ubuntu or Gnome, and I'm glad linux provide…

Even Windows and macOS provide a higher level of configurability out of the box than Gnome does.

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#105

I think there are some very good critiques of snap (performance, provenance, reproducibility, namespacing, etc), and the first couple points in this article seem reasonable. However I can't agree with this: > apt/deb is a wonderful package management system and everyone is happy with it, at least the majority of Ubuntu/Debian users. Besides, dnf/rpm is also a similar packaging system for Fedora/RH systems and everyon…

[deleted]

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#106
post #30

I had been an Ubuntu user for almost 16 years, on servers, laptops, and recently containers. The snap situation with Ubuntu is just plain unpalatable, both in principal and in practice. I became so disappointed in the move by Canonical that I finally left Ubuntu altogether and no longer recommend it to friends and colleagues. It takes years to cultivate a garden, but only minutes to destroy it.

Interesting, what distro did you move to?

I took a shot and tried Manjaro. After using it for a few weeks, I can say that I absolutely love it, and will be a Manjaro user for a long time on my personal machines. For new users, I have been recommending Pop_OS.

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#107

I think there are some very good critiques of snap (performance, provenance, reproducibility, namespacing, etc), and the first couple points in this article seem reasonable. However I can't agree with this: > apt/deb is a wonderful package management system and everyone is happy with it, at least the majority of Ubuntu/Debian users. Besides, dnf/rpm is also a similar packaging system for Fedora/RH systems and everyon…

> I want all of the QT libs embedded in the package.

I don't understand why anybody wants this.

Libraries should have major versions and the latest of each major version should be compatible with anything using that major version, because that's what major version means for a library. You might then need to have more than one major version of the library installed, but any two applications using the same one should be able to use the same copy, and then have it maintained by one person in one place.

If every package has a separate copy of every library, people have to maintain them all separately. When that library has a security update, you now have to update five dozen packages instead of one or two, and have a security vulnerability if any of the maintainers don't keep up in a timely fashion. Which not all of them will.

> I want the proprietary app in a container.

People want containers to be magic but they're actually a hard problem. You want the app not to be able to do anything you don't want it to but still be able to do everything you do want it to.

A backup app that can't read my files is useless; it can't back them up. But it shouldn't be able to modify or delete them. But it should be able to modify its own state. It shouldn't have general network access but should be able to communicate with the backup server, which might have to be specified by the user and not the package maintainer. It doesn't need access to the GPU or the ability to use gigabytes of memory, but it does need to be able to transfer a lot of data over the network, but the data it transfers is lower priority than other network packets.

That requires the person configuring the app's container to have both detailed knowledge of the app and detailed knowledge of the container system. It's common for this not to be the case.

And that's why containers are a mess, not anything to do with the package manager, which should have little to do with the container system outside of packaging the app's default container configuration with the app.

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#108
Are the arguments presented legitimate? Doesn't apt put the power in the hands of the distro developers and not the end users? After all they get to decide what is packaged and what is not.

Its all open source code so you can download and install yourself so I don't buy the argument about it being against the GNU philosophy.

Apt and snaps solve different problems. The only argument I can see here is the one about the back-end which is old and tired.

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are parallels with the Gnome team's stance that "we know what's best for you", and that turns off a lot of linux users. There is a tension between those who wish to turn linux into Mac OS or Windows, and those who want fine-grained control over the workings of their computer. The arrogance of the gnome team and the snap apologists is a huge red flag to me. I don't use Ubuntu or Gnome, and I'm glad linux provide…

I find gnome to be pretty configurable. The opinionated defaults aren’t so bad because you can just replace the environment if you dislike it

No. NO.

You can't even change language shortcut from default (Win + Space). As I understand this comes from MacOS, which gnome devs brainlessly copy.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/41480/how-do-i-change-my-key...

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#110
I am currently using lxd to manage containers on a headless server. I just found out that lxd on Ubuntu 20.04 has snapd as a dependency, which seems a bit odd. Does anyone know if there is an easy way to install lxd without snap, or should I just ditch it and try some other lxc-container manager?
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