Snap was the reason I said goodbye to Ubuntu
Same here. If I want forced updates I can use Windows.
Disabling automatic refresh for Snap from store
131–140 of 201 posts
Re: Disabling automatic refresh for Snap from store
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see they're honestly trying to ease life for technically illiterate users (or, put it another way, to chase Apple's "just works" experience). But ignoring the needs of professional users (who are influencers) is a sure way to divert all users.
Many technically illiterate users don't like forced automatic updates either. Having your software behave one way one day and another the next day is user-hostile. The only people it helps are organizations that wish to lower support costs.
I have heard disturbing stories from tech-illiterate windows users complaining about forced upgrades, reboots—even fullscreen Office365 ads. It's a pain to be "the computer guy" for windows users. They need help constantly and for silly things that has changed place or behaviour. I also do support for tech-illiterate linux users on Fedora and they never call or have trouble. It just works, even with auto-updated flatpaks enabled.
Re: Disabling automatic refresh for Snap from store
#133Please correct me if I am wrong, but you can simply snap install with a --channel, which could be a specific version. This way it is not auto updating, since it's on that specific channel/version.
Aren't channels things like "stable" or "bleeding edge" or something like that? Which means that this would only work if the snap vendor cooperates.
But then you can't really blame Canonical and that makes the wole agument moot.
Re: Disabling automatic refresh for Snap from store
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
But they're not. You can very well have the swap on top of LVM on top of LUKS. And the root and other partitions share that same LVM and LUKS. So now you have FDE and the kernel will know how to assemble it all. The only difference with the default pop OS install is that the swap key isn't changed on every boot. But since the other partitions holding the actual data use persistent keys, that doesn't look like much of…
If I wanted full disk encryption, my memory state in swap would sure as hell be one of the things I wanted encrypted.
Of course, you would. And it is. All the partitions, including swap, are on top of a LUKS volume.
Re: Disabling automatic refresh for Snap from store
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't channels things like "stable" or "bleeding edge" or something like that? Which means that this would only work if the snap vendor cooperates.
But then you can't really blame Canonical and that makes the wole agument moot.
The argument is that "channels" are not "versions". So inside a channel, you cannot disable updates. And that's the way Canonical operates, they regularly push updates to their "stable" channel. There is no "v1.2.3" channel that will forever stay at that particular version until you switch channels.
The point is that you are the mercy of the snap publisher, and as the sysadmin, you cannot prevent the software from updating. Whether you should or not do that is a different debate.
Re: Disabling automatic refresh for Snap from store
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're a programmer I'd say Arch or Debian then configure as per your needs. As long as you don't do things blindly it will be very stable and blazing fast.
In my experience, Manjaro is a great, user-friendly version of Arch. YMMV, but I highly recommend it!
I used to be a pretty hardcore Manjaro evangelist (and I still recommend it to people who want to quit distro-hopping), but I've been burned a handful of times by it. Arch is obviously a notoriously unstable distro, but Manjaro in particular can lead to some nasty issues. Especially if you're mix-and-matching AUR packages with the Manjaro repository ones; I've had at least 3 or 4 systems get entirely borked because of an untracked dependency or something being too far behind in the Manjaro repo.
Re: Disabling automatic refresh for Snap from store
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
I personally use ubuntu and have used snap enough to get thoroughly burned and annoyed by it. Slow starts, no auto-update controls with bad defaults corrupting running programs, spammed mount points... (edit: see comment below for some limited controls to reduce the frequency of auto-updates) But, unless I'm missing something about latest or future releases, isn't it still optional? Can't you use apt instead and unin…
> But, unless I'm missing something about latest or future releases, isn't it still optional? Can't you use apt instead and uninstall snapd altogether? There seem to be more and more things that are only delivered as snaps. I haven't used Ubuntu on the desktop in a while (and even then, it was just trying it out), but I remember that trying to apt install would say "use the snap". I think LXD is in that case, for exa…
> There seem to be more and more things that are only delivered as snaps.
I'm on Ubuntu, and of all the software I use (I count around 20 programs installed not through the Ubuntu apt repositories), fortunately only two are available only on snaps - Chromium and Subsync. The first actually accelerated my move to Firefox.
Regarding Subsync, I had to write a ridicolous script to start/stop all the snap services - ridicolous because Snap has an integrity service that overwrites any change to the Snap system (!!), so one can't even hack the Snap system files without disabling such service. It actually gets worse - Ubuntu has a relatively tight intergration with snap: one can't have the `snapd` serviced disabled (without hacks), because the Ubuntu software upgrade invokes it if present, and if it's disabled, the upgrade will hang.
If Ubuntu will force more software to go through Snap, I'll abandon it (after many, many years).
Re: Disabling automatic refresh for Snap from store
#138Having observed (well deserved) criticism of both Snap and Flatpak during the years, Flatpak seems to emerge as the most sensible solution, continuously addressing and improving on the pain points and security challenges. I have been using Fedora 34/35 the last year or so, and Flatpaks are well integrated and mostly just works without any performance hit. Being able to adjust permissions per app (with Flatseal) has a…
Solution to what? Personally I think ALL of such package managers exists only for a reason: satisfy commercial software needs, in disguise to being developed for free by a community instead of being neglected and pushed to the place they deserve, witch is /dev/null.
The future of package management is NixOS/Guix System, the future of isolation are cgroups (see FireJail, BubbleWrap). The rest is absurd like full-stack virtualization on x86 to make VMWare profit, HW OEMs profit, consulting profits etc and people who should not, because of ignorance, running infra built by someone else a brick at a time, or the way to create disaster waiting to happen...
I see exactly ZERO good cases for snap, flatpak, appimage etc... ZERO, really.
Re: Disabling automatic refresh for Snap from store
#139Wow. This thread isn't controversial at all. I haven't found a single comment making a case for Snap. It seems to be universally disliked - at least by this crowd.
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My reasons for hating for example the FF snap are quite valid thank you very much.
Shall I ponder out loud my own unflattering assumptions as to why you are ok with something like snaps?
Re: Disabling automatic refresh for Snap from store
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm switching to debian my next install. It's similar enough internally
For a personal desktop, I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re willing to run sid, because while the outdated software collection is no big deal most of the time, it’s a tremendous pain when you really do need a new version of something, and you ultimately just give up and instal the whole thing from source into /usr/local, which in a half-dozen years predictably evolves into a mess. Running sid is an option, but the…
I've been using Debian stable on the desktop exclusively since Etch (around 2007). I strongly recommend it for someone who is always busy and doesn't have time to fiddle around. I run Sid in a schroot for the one package I need which is not in backports (a recent R for RStudio. Reference: http://charles.plessy.org/Debian/debi%C3%A2neries/r-4.1/ ). Debian stable relieves all the pain of the frequent breakage (CUPS) from constant unnecessary upgrades.