Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it • Hacker News Board

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it

#131

Post by amaccuish » Sat, May 02, 2020, 4:41 PM UTC

kleiba wrote: post #13

Matt3o12_ wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently, snaps are compressed to save disk space, which is why they take so long to start: - https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/9scoif/snap_package... Saving disk space is certainly useful for rarely used apps, however, your web browser (and any other frequencely used apps), shouldn't be compressed, especially if there is ample disk space.

Saving disk space is certainly useful for rarely used apps Is it really? I can't recall the last time I ran into disk space issues, must have been in the 1990s.

I still don't understand though. I run on btrfs with compression turned on and have noticed 0 performance issues. Only with snaps as mentioned.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it

#132

Post by simcop2387 » Sat, May 02, 2020, 4:41 PM UTC

wegs wrote: post #122

ohazi wrote: post #115

If you're looking for an alternative to Ubuntu but want to stick with a Debian-based distribution, I'll continue to recommend Debian testing. It's a rolling release, so you don't have to stop what you're doing every 6 months - 3 years to install a huge update that changes the way everything works. It's more stable than the name would suggest, as long as you follow a few reasonable best-practices [1]. Software availab…

Is there any stable way to go Ubuntu -> Debian? I don't want testing. Stable is fine. I find each version of Ubuntu worse than the previous. It's change for the sake of change, and as in this case, something really thoughtful like .deb gets replaced with something which appears slapped together poorly. I just want a stable, working system, and Ubuntu seems to no longer be the way to have that.

Best way is to backup your home directory and re-install. trying to do anything else is going to cause you far more headaches than anything could be worth.

You may also want to keep some places like /var/lib/ if you have databases going, etc. I'd just do a complete backup and restore pieces as you find you need them.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it

#133

Post by stinos » Sat, May 02, 2020, 4:42 PM UTC

searchableguy wrote: post #109

harrygeez wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a hard problem. And Microsoft didn't have a choice. Given an option regular users will never update their computers, perhaps partly due to fear of what they don't understand, fear of change, or maybe due to past bad update experiences. I witness this in my mom with technology all the time. Every time there's a popup she mini-panics, and she has trained herself to click close every time she sees something she…

Are linux users regular users?

Some of them, very much. Go have a look in academia where there are hordes of tech-illiterates working on linux just because of reasons like some obscure piece of software working only properly on linux, because the postdoc did it that way, because it's cheaper, because they think it has to be done like that, ... Last lab I was in it was just painful to see how much time was completely lost on trying to get things working by people not understanding computers or OS. So if auto-update can alleviate some of those problems, why not. If it breaks things, well that's something else :)

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it

#134

Post by rrdharan » Sat, May 02, 2020, 4:42 PM UTC

jimbob45 wrote: post #123

harrygeez wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a hard problem. And Microsoft didn't have a choice. Given an option regular users will never update their computers, perhaps partly due to fear of what they don't understand, fear of change, or maybe due to past bad update experiences. I witness this in my mom with technology all the time. Every time there's a popup she mini-panics, and she has trained herself to click close every time she sees something she…

The customer is always right. Say it with me.

The other customers, impacted when one customer is out of date and their machine turns into part of a massive DDoS Botnet, are also customers. Say that with me. It's a distributed problem that you can't fix or meaningfully reason about just by imagining each user on their own in a vacuum.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it

#135

Post by SlowRobotAhead » Sat, May 02, 2020, 4:43 PM UTC

apexalpha wrote: post #119

searchableguy wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are linux users regular users?

What if your goal is to bring Linux to the masses?

Well then there is a lot of work to do besides snapping and updates.

For a normal user, the INSTANT something goes wrong in Linux, you step from “something kinda like Windows” to “100% Voodoo you are expected to know”

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it

#136

Post by proactivesvcs » Sat, May 02, 2020, 4:43 PM UTC

harrygeez wrote: post #103

greendave wrote: post #18

> Auto-updating of snaps can only be deferred at best, until at some point, like Windows, it auto-updates anyway. Even on metered connections, snaps auto-update anyway after some time. This attitude is obnoxious. Yes, not everybody is on a metered connection or running a mission-critical system, but some are, and it is hardly unreasonable to accommodate them.

This is a hard problem. And Microsoft didn't have a choice. Given an option regular users will never update their computers, perhaps partly due to fear of what they don't understand, fear of change, or maybe due to past bad update experiences. I witness this in my mom with technology all the time. Every time there's a popup she mini-panics, and she has trained herself to click close every time she sees something she…

> Given an option regular users will never update their computers

This does not reflect the hundreds of regular users that I have serviced over the years. Perhaps fewer than five would postpone updates beyond a few days for convenience / uncertainty, the rest would always install Windows updates within a day or two of being prompted.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it

#137

Post by commoner » Sat, May 02, 2020, 4:43 PM UTC

simion314 wrote: post #106

commoner wrote: post #51

Snap has an issue on certain Linux distributions (including Fedora and Arch) in which many applications render tofu characters (□□□□□) instead of text. https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/snapped-app-not-loading-fonts-o... Canonical needs to invest in compatibility if it wants Snap to be adopted in distributions other than Ubuntu. Flatpak doesn't have this issue, and unlike Snap, its server implementation is decentralized,…

Isn't flatpack designed from the point of Desktop users (GNOME) where snaps are designed with a server in mind? This would mean that are very different and you can't just substitute them.

While there are Snaps for server software, Snaps are marketed as a way to publish applications "for desktop, cloud, and Internet of Things" "across Linux on any distribution or version" - and users expect Snap applications to work properly on all Linux distributions, not just Ubuntu. Otherwise, developers could just publish a .deb package for Ubuntu like they did before.

https://snapcraft.io

Yes, Flatpak is targeted to desktop applications while Snap has a broader scope, but it's questionable whether Snap's mandatory automatic updates are desirable in a server environment.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it

#138

Post by Achshar » Sat, May 02, 2020, 4:44 PM UTC

jimbob45 wrote: post #123

harrygeez wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a hard problem. And Microsoft didn't have a choice. Given an option regular users will never update their computers, perhaps partly due to fear of what they don't understand, fear of change, or maybe due to past bad update experiences. I witness this in my mom with technology all the time. Every time there's a popup she mini-panics, and she has trained herself to click close every time she sees something she…

The customer is always right. Say it with me.

Disagree. “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” - Henry Ford. Customer is mostly right. Not always. Use your best judgement as a business owner. Innovate where necessary and stick to customer feedback where you think it makes sense.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it

#139

Post by zrm » Sat, May 02, 2020, 4:44 PM UTC

jquast wrote: post #67

dmw_ng wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bottom line is they optimize installation time by amortizing it out over the runtime life of the package, or in other words, optimizing a one time 15 second process to be a 14 second process, in return for making a many-times 1 second process a 30 second process. It makes absolutely no sense. They do this using a filesystem originally designed for embedded devices, using a driver hacked to disable threading suppo…

> On-demand decompression like this has made very little sense on desktops since the mid 90s Ok, maybe not desktops? But ZFS on-disk compression is a sysadmin's frickin dream -- just one example that you can access logfiles with plaintext tools like grep while benefiting from the space savings with neglible cost, LZ4 has basically no overhead at all, https://www.servethehome.com/the-case-for-using-zfs-compress... I r…

Filesystem compression is a completely different animal than this. It has to deal with your ability to modify the file at any time. It doesn't compress the whole file together, it does it in blocks. When you launch a binary (and the system mmaps it) it doesn't have to decompress the entire file before you can start using it, only the first compression block.

Compression also typically makes it faster to launch applications from spinning rust, because the bottleneck is the drive and reading 50MB and decompressing it is faster than reading 100MB uncompressed. This would be true of SSDs as well except that most of them already do this internally.

But snap isn't reading e.g. 64kB and then giving you 128kB on demand (and then prefetching the next block) like the filesystem does, it has to read and decompress the entire 100+MB package before you can even open it. That is very silly and adds a perceptible amount of latency.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it

#140

Post by harrygeez » Sat, May 02, 2020, 4:45 PM UTC

jimbob45 wrote: post #123

harrygeez wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a hard problem. And Microsoft didn't have a choice. Given an option regular users will never update their computers, perhaps partly due to fear of what they don't understand, fear of change, or maybe due to past bad update experiences. I witness this in my mom with technology all the time. Every time there's a popup she mini-panics, and she has trained herself to click close every time she sees something she…

The customer is always right. Say it with me.

Unfortunately this is an attitude I do not agree with. Especially having worked in the service sector, far too many people use this as an excuse to be rude and unreasonable.

I believe in mutual respect