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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

#131

Post by ppseafield »

Darmody wrote: post #102
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

EDIT: As a reply to this pointed out, these predate the things I claimed were created from NIH syndrome. Please disregard.

Original comment:

They also created their own init system Upstart, only to replace it with systemd later. They have their own source control system, Bazaar.

I really appreciated Ubuntu back in '06 when my laptop's wifi and graphics drivers just worked out of the box. I've used Ubuntu in various forms for a long time. But their management has some serious NIH problems.

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#133

Post by theevilsharpie »

ppseafield wrote: post #131
Darmody wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

EDIT: As a reply to this pointed out, these predate the things I claimed were created from NIH syndrome. Please disregard. Original comment: They also created their own init system Upstart, only to replace it with systemd later. They have their own source control system, Bazaar. I really appreciated Ubuntu back in '06 when my laptop's wifi and graphics drivers just worked out of the box. I've used Ubuntu in various f…

> They also created their own init system Upstart, only to replace it with systemd later. They have their own source control system, Bazaar... their management has some serious NIH problems.

Citing these as a case of NIH is inaccurate -- Upstart and Bazaar predate Systemd and Git, respectively.

It's fairer to say that Canonical's technology, for whatever reason, often doesn't seem to catch on with the broader FOSS community.

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#134

Post by ppseafield »

mnm1 wrote: post #119
dheera wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also these "AppImage" files. They launch, but there is no guidance on how to install them to the system. Launching Chrome: I click the Chrome icon. Launching PrusaSlicer: Start a terminal and type chmod 755 ~/Downloads/PrusaSlicer-2.2.0+linux-x64-202003211856.AppImage ~/Downloads/PrusaSlicer-2.2.0+linux-x64-202003211856.AppImage That doesn't seem like progress to me from a UX perspective.

And flatpack. So now there's apt, snap, appimage, and flatpack. 4 fucking systems that need to be maintained just to update apps on an OS. Frankly, it's ridiculous and the apps from all those alternate systems all have some issues too. None work as well as apt. I don't understand what is wrong with apt. If they want newer packages provide a repo for newer shit. Problem solved.

Apt is great as long as what you want is available in the repo. Over the years I have had a few issues though.

Often apt's versions trail behind the newest versions. There are some good reasons for this, but it can get in the way sometimes.

I have had to ad a lot of PPAs to get some of the software I wanted. The Aurora channel PPA for Firefox stopped getting updates at one point (they discontinued it), and I didn't realize until a few versions later. I don't think any of these package managers have that problem figured out, but PPAs are commonly maintained by third party community/unofficial folks. I had the same problems with Arch's AUR.

I believe it's fixed now, but for a long time Steam required a lot of 32 bit libraries, which meant two versions of several dependencies were installed on my machine.

Additionally we were using an older version of Ruby at work which required OpenSSL1.0 for certain libraries, and a Ruby upgrade (from an old version to a less old version) broke my development environment.

Not that the others are perfect. Just for example the Spotify snap package from the software center doesn't even work. The Deb had problems on my machine which I couldn't resolve. I finally installed Flatpak to get a working version.

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#135

Post by ppseafield »

theevilsharpie wrote: post #133
ppseafield wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EDIT: As a reply to this pointed out, these predate the things I claimed were created from NIH syndrome. Please disregard. Original comment: They also created their own init system Upstart, only to replace it with systemd later. They have their own source control system, Bazaar. I really appreciated Ubuntu back in '06 when my laptop's wifi and graphics drivers just worked out of the box. I've used Ubuntu in various f…

> They also created their own init system Upstart, only to replace it with systemd later. They have their own source control system, Bazaar... their management has some serious NIH problems. Citing these as a case of NIH is inaccurate -- Upstart and Bazaar predate Systemd and Git, respectively. It's fairer to say that Canonical's technology, for whatever reason, often doesn't seem to catch on with the broader FOSS co…

Ah! That's my error; thank you for pointing that out. I hadn't realized that. I'll edit my comment.

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#136

Post by brnt »

2ion wrote: post #44
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…

I can only comment on snap for the server (non-desktop) side of things but packages in Ubuntu, which are Debian packages, contain random (none or a lot) amounts of shell scripts /var/lib/dpkg/info/* which may fail for any reason and introduce any number of side effects into the system, as they handle sometimes very complex software migrations and can change any number of things. Surely the desktop has some history he…

If rpm/yum fixes much of apts problem, why didn't Ubuntu change for that?

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#137

Post by fgonzag »

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 here, were already in talks with red hat to move dozens of servers which are currently running ubuntu with enterprise subscriptions.

We know redhat is just as bad at forcing people to use their software (systemd...) but they have to key points which ubuntu lacks:

- they usually win their software wars

- their software usually works well enough and they give you great support

- they mantain their projects and live with their decisions, unlike ubuntu which flips and flops with major updates (I'm waiting for them to switch from netplan to something else again and fuck up all my ansible config again, which was already battle tested)

- they have better management tools overall.

The only reason we went with ubuntu in the first place was because it was familiar to all of us (we had all ran it on our desktops). When they take that familiarity away, then they lose their only real advantage.

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#138

Post by alkonaut »

zrm wrote: post #107
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…

> 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 b…

> people have to maintain them all separately.

Yes. I think most people (most people don't run Linux in any form) would like to think of their system as having a collection of independent applictions, not a set of libraries.

If people are expected to "maintain", or even understand, the concept of shared libraries, then I think the system is only geared to power users and tinkerers (the current user base more or less).

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#139

Post by darren0 »

I've been unhappy with the direction of Ubuntu for awhile, but having said that it's still the best collection of packages that install with fairly sane defaults for desktop/laptop. I've adopted a model of starting with ubuntu-minimal installation and just installing the debs I want (disable recommended packages by default). This gives me a fairly reliable base from Ubuntu but a system assembled how I want (except systemd, can't avoid systemd).

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#140

Post by dheera »

mnm1 wrote: post #119
dheera wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also these "AppImage" files. They launch, but there is no guidance on how to install them to the system. Launching Chrome: I click the Chrome icon. Launching PrusaSlicer: Start a terminal and type chmod 755 ~/Downloads/PrusaSlicer-2.2.0+linux-x64-202003211856.AppImage ~/Downloads/PrusaSlicer-2.2.0+linux-x64-202003211856.AppImage That doesn't seem like progress to me from a UX perspective.

And flatpack. So now there's apt, snap, appimage, and flatpack. 4 fucking systems that need to be maintained just to update apps on an OS. Frankly, it's ridiculous and the apps from all those alternate systems all have some issues too. None work as well as apt. I don't understand what is wrong with apt. If they want newer packages provide a repo for newer shit. Problem solved.

I think the main problem with apt is that the traditional way of using it is to depend on other libraries installed by apt, so if two pieces of software want two different versions of something that are not forward/backward compatible then you have issues. However, I don't see why they can't statically compile OR containerize and still use apt. Just have the .deb install an appimage to /usr/bin and create the necessary .desktop files. The .deb would then have almost zero dependencies. Problem solved.
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