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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

#141

Post by freedomben »

Barrin92 wrote: post #126
znpy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, what distro did you move to?

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

I moved to Fedora several years ago after getting fed up with Canonical. While it hasn't been entirely pain-free, I experience a lot less pain than I used to. Even OS upgrades alone, always work on Fedora. Modern Fedora is the most "just works" distro there is IMHO (but I'm still mad at Canonical, so am probably biasing my opinion with emotion).

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#142

Post by freedomben »

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 have the same problem, except I also add Brew for Linux to that list D-:

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#144

Post by uhnllon »

This is a rant against snaps. Well, lets get to it.

Sorry, snaps are a LOT slower than just running a binary. Did I said they're slow, well they're slow.

I have an SSD and it feels like it's 1992 and I'm trying to run some snap from a Cyrix without cache and 16MB of RAM. I switch to binary version (oh my chromium), and it freaking flash, 0.x sec. and you're there, the full app is available.

Snaps are a NO GO my friends.

Besides having LOTS of problems running out of the standard GUI (Gnome3), or even in the standard (supposedly heavy-tested) GUI, they are slow.

Sorry, I've already said that uh? SLOW, that's snaps.

If there is somebody from Ubuntu here, please take a serious look about how snapped apps (pun intended), read/write $HOME defaults.

I mean we have to have defaults somewhere. So thingies like the colour theme, the theme engine, default download path, etc. are fully followed just as the user has configured them.

I use Ubuntu, but I certainly would not be using in the future if my applications which now take merely 0.x seconds to open start to take, 3-4-15! seconds to open. I fact I started to look to Debian and Fedora, they currently appear to have saner defaults than Ubuntu.

No, the second time I open an app in a session doesn't count AT ALL for the speed.

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#145

Post by AlexCoventry »

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.

I don't understand what the big deal is, though. I run ubuntu and I don't run any snaps. This seems to work fine.

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#146

Post by securityfreak »

quantummkv wrote: post #27
kd913 wrote: post #10

You people do realize that snaps have been around for 4 years right? It has widespread first party support from various companies including Microsoft, Amazon, Mozilla, Google, Spotify, JetBrains etc... They have wide spread adoption with almost 10x the install base of Flatpaks. Do you guys really need to keep throwing blogs at something which isn't going away and is useful to users? How is this useful in anyway? Cano…

The main point here is that Snaps take away control from the user. The user has no control over how and when apps update. The backend for snaps is proprietary and completely in control of Canonical. If they decide to shove ads down through Snaps, they can at any time. And the whole hijacking of the chromium apt package to backdoor in snaps without user consent is a move straight out of the Microsoft playbook This fee…

Very well said! I am afraid there is a prophecy in your description. I have started moving all of our infrastructure away from Ubuntu at work. This sounds horrible. 2020 has been bad enough for one year.

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#147

Post by uhnllon »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #93
Darmody wrote: 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 would agree with you in this about snaps IF snap were somewhere close to production level software.

Nobody can assemble some new kind of app packaging, slowing the starting speed to 5-10 seconds and call that "good rounded software"

"It is just a couple of seconds more sometimes, not a big deal" isn't going to cut it. Most of the Internet using Ubuntu, already knows that.

I think Canonical is again in denial.

It already happened a couple of times: MIR, Unity (buried by not being community driven probably), Unity8, the mobile project or something, all but forgotten now.

This snap thing is probable the pet project from a couple top guys in Canonical. Maybe hundreds of powerpoint presentations have been watched about some "big strategy" for the next years, but they didn't know the thing (snap) is unbearable slow.

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#148

Post by securityfreak »

The first I heard of snaps was while I was upgrading from 18.04 to 20.04 (I only do LTS for work servers). What drove _me_ away personally, was I had no idea what snap is and it was all over the place all of a sudden. After studying up I was like “no I don’t want that, I want to have full control over my system”.

I switched to Fedora Server. The packages are much fresher, the kernel is fresher. It is a “staging” area for Red Hat, which for me is a plus.

Goodbye Ubuntu. I’ve been using you as my primary Linux distro since version 6.06!

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#149

Post by panpanna »

I'm _fine_ with snaps.

As long as they are limited to applications (i.e. not OS components) and look reasonably like normal applications.

Why? Because you can't ask developers to package their apps for 100+ distros. And they let us run latest versions of apps on an otherwise stable/old OS.

Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

#150

Post by KCUOJJQJ »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #145
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.

I don't understand what the big deal is, though. I run ubuntu and I don't run any snaps. This seems to work fine.

I do the same on 19.10. I also use another Chromium anyway, one that has hardware accelerated video playback.

https://launchpad.net/~saiarcot895/+archive/ubuntu/chromium-...

It's available on Ubuntu 20.04.

Once the regular Chromium had a higher version number than the Chromium in the PPA. aptitude updated to the regular Chromium. I then gave the PPA Chromium a priority of 1000 by creating a file called /etc/apt/preferences.d/saiarcot895-chromium-beta with the following content:

  Package: *chromium*
  Pin: release o=LP-PPA-saiarcot895-chromium-beta
  Pin-Priority: 1000
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