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Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

techtudor.blogspot.com

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Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#121

Post by slezyr »

krastanov wrote: post #113
slezyr wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Your example is dead wrong. I run Gnome and my language shortcut is CapsLock. I used the Tweaks configuration software which is part of Gnome (it is the one you are supposed to use for more invasive configuration). I do find Gnome plenty configurable. You just need to go in order of Settings -> Tweaks -> their weird registry -> custom extensions. I would agree this is convoluted, but I do not mind it (as a power user…

Yup, you can all the miracles in the console, BUT reread the parent comment

> 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

IT'S NOT CONFIGURABLE. You can hack your way around their "opinionated defaults" which are for MacOS user from USA.

Take a look at the KDE's settings for this case https://i.stack.imgur.com/ukKmp.png

There is no reason to google, install some tool and mess with it.

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#122

Post by htns »

SweetestRug wrote: post #5

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.

Same. My go to has been to use Qubes if you at all can, because it's actually secure, and then to use Ubuntu, because it actually works. To me most of the bad reputation of desktop linux seemed to come from people refusing to use Ubuntu for demented reasons... But I have must not have been following distro news at all in recent years, because I only just now learned snap is not fully open. That's quite the cynical walled-garden power grab and bad enough by itself to drop Ubuntu.

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#123

Post by war1025 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #78
war1025 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian has stable, testing, unstable, and experimental repositories. If you only enable stable, then you are signing up for very outdated software. If you add `testing`, you get quite a ways towards having an up to date system, while still not having to worry too much about odd bugs. Adding in `unstable` gets you about as close to up to date as you can get without compiling the source yourself. Experimental is good t…

Debian strongly advises against mixing repositories: https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian#Don.27t_make_a_Frank... Debian Testing is an option, but would you recommend that over a distribution focused on rolling releases, like Arch? From my vantage point (which isn't particularly good, as a non-Linux user myself), most of the Debian project's effort is concentrated on producing Debian Stable. Case in point, securit…

> would you recommend that over a distribution focused on rolling releases, like Arch?

Everything about Debian except the `stable` repository is explicitly a rolling release.

> Debian strongly advises against mixing repositories

Certainly you wouldn't want to add in the other repositories if you're aiming for Debian Stable type guarantees.

This is the `sources.list` file that I've been using for nearly a decade:

   deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing main non-free contrib
   deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ unstable main non-free contrib
   deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ experimental main non-free contrib
And then I have a preferences file that prefers testing to unstable to experimental (actually three separate files in the preferences.d directory, but I'd think you could combine them.

   Package: *
   Pin: release a=testing
   Pin-Priority: 700
   
   Package: *
   Pin: release a=unstable
   Pin-Priority: 650

   Package: *
   Pin: release a=experimental
   Pin-Priority: 600
It may not be advised, but it works pretty well. Sometimes you have to get a bit creative when you go to run `apt-get dist-upgrade` and it wants to delete half your system, but usually you can just manually install individual upgrades (`apt-get install `) until it unwedges itself.

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#124

Post by curt15 »

amelius wrote: post #32
schmichael wrote: post #25

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…

And I want: - a user-space install option - rollback functionality (!) - being able to install multiple versions at the same time and switch between them - if I really need to: being able to install the latest version (and even an unstable release); if that means that apt-get has to download and compile stuff, then I'm ok with that.

Flatpak ticks all of those boxes: https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/wiki/Tips-&-Tricks

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#125

Post by war1025 »

lucb1e wrote: post #100
gentleman11 wrote: post #45

Devils advocate: it is plain weird for every app I install to have so much file system and system access. It’s nice to have a sandboxed solution built in. It would be nice if it was a solution that didn’t have the problems that this article listed, but snaps could be adapted to be good with a few changes. Why a proprietary backend though? I suppose cannonical views packaged apps as a platform opportunity and wants to…

Wasn't AppArmor already doing this though? If I remember correctly (and I never properly read up on it, so please correct me if I'm wrong) it limits which syscalls you can do and with which parameters, like opening only certain files. I think apparmor rules/profiles were becoming more common to be delivered with their respective packages (I'm using Debian), and it sounds like that already solves your exact concern wi…

AppArmor has only ever caused me pain.

For whatever reason it's decided that I'm not allowed to connect to the network.

It's easy enough to remove the package, but it likes to tag along as a dependency when installing updates.

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#126

Post by Barrin92 »

znpy wrote: post #30
SweetestRug wrote: post #5

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?

Not OP but I have the same grievance. I moved to Fedora on my dev machines.

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#127

Post by jlarocco »

billme wrote: 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…

> Sure, this might be true for the average user

To be fair, that has always been Ubuntu's target market...

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#128

Post by Zardoz84 »

gentleman11 wrote: post #52
dilandau wrote: post #39

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

Compare against KDE and check how far is "configurable".

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#129

Post by compsciphd »

I'll take a contrarian/devil's advocate stance. for some applications and some usage scenarios, snaps makes a lot of sense.

Take a multi user system and users who run applications like chromium or firefox.

It's dangerous to upgrade the application while users are running them as the files the running applications depend on can change thereby making them either break in weird ways or force the end users to restart them.

if these apps were just distributed as snaps, it wouldn't matter. they would keep on using the old image without any problem, while new executions would get the new image. If one really wanted to encourage them to exit and restart (i.e. some security hole), the same mechanisms that exist today to get people to restart could be used.

with that said, I think it should be a choice, not something force down our throat. if I install something with apt/dpkg , I expect it to be an apt/dpkg package, not a snap. if I want to use snap, I'll install it with snap.

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#130

Post by ornitorrincos »

war1025 wrote: post #74
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd expect users who go into Debian expecting some power-user version of Ubuntu to be disappointed. To be happy on Debian, you need to adopt their philosophy that stability is better than having the latest-and-greatest. For those unfamiliar, Debian releases come out about once every two years, at which point all software in Debian's repositories is frozen at its current version. Software receives security updates bet…

Debian has stable, testing, unstable, and experimental repositories. If you only enable stable, then you are signing up for very outdated software. If you add `testing`, you get quite a ways towards having an up to date system, while still not having to worry too much about odd bugs. Adding in `unstable` gets you about as close to up to date as you can get without compiling the source yourself. Experimental is good t…

back when I used debian(10 years ago) testing was the staging ground for the future stable version, so it got a couple of issues that varied as the mantainers stabilized the system.

then unstable was a really rolling release system, in my experience more stable than testing(understandable quirk as is was used by mantainers to prepare the next release).

At that point I decided that I'd rather use arch then unstable debian, but unstable was quite similar regarding package candence and stability.

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