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

jatan.blog

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

#181

Post by numpad0 »

harrygeez wrote: post #110
na85 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gnome has been replicating the worst parts of windows (the registry comes instantly to mind) since the release of Gnome 3.

I think gconf and macOS's plist have proven that Microsoft is at least somewhat right with registry, or at least the idea is. I don't know why people didn't like it and honestly I don't have a strong opinion on it, but I have a feeling in some ways Microsoft didn't have much of choice given that they need to have backwards compatibility.

I was warned far more than necessary about corrupting The Holy Windows Registry Hive, I think that’s the entirety of the problem with it.

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

#182

Post by lonelappde »

Glavnokoman wrote: post #94
chrisma0 wrote: post #2

Good to see that I am not alone at being upset about the current snap vs. deb vs. flatpak Ubuntu situation. I always considered a unified package management system as a huge plus.

I do not understand that. Why being upset? If you do not like Ubuntu just install some other distro and be done with it. There are many out there! Fedora, Arch (Manjaro) and even plain Debian are all much better then Ubuntu these days.

It's exausting to switch every time an upgrade is a betrayal

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

#183

Post by chrisandchris »

searchableguy wrote: post #142
stinos wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

Linux subsystem is there on windows. You don't have to use linux for majority of cases. Conda is pretty decent. But I want to know what specific things they use that can't work on linux subsystem? Maybe there are some and I don't know about them.

There‘s a simple reason: speed. Have you ever tried to use WSL 1 with npm? I doubt do, because it just takes 10 times more time than on „real“ linux.

Also, it‘s way easier to work with multiple desktops and windows position better than on Windows where it seems that they are opening always there where you don‘t look.

There are also quite a lot of others, IMHO.

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

#184

Post by majewsky »

simias wrote: post #161
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…

>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. You make it sound like an irrational fear but there's a real cost/benefit ratio to consider when you upgrade a machine. I personally always try to keep my machines up to date but stuff does break from time to time. Like last week an ar…

> You make it sound like an irrational fear but there's a real cost/benefit ratio to consider when you upgrade a machine.

95+% of users have no chance of even making this cost-benefit analysis because they cannot assess the scope or risk associated with the upgrade even if they wanted to. They have to rely on vendors making those assessments for them.

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

#185

Post by alerighi »

ordinaryperson wrote: post #12

Maybe I'm in the minority but I like Snaps. I wish all software would auto-update silently in the background -- when's the last time you even thought about upgrading Chrome? The author of this article claims it's too difficult to find Flatpak apps and that the Ubuntu software center prioritizes Snaps over .deb. Are platforms never allowed to migrate to a new standard? Why is it Canonical's fault that authors of indiv…

The problem with snaps is that they are a stupid way to distribute software that doesn't solve any problem, while introducing many other.

Basically a snap package is a container, that means an image of an operating system just to run one software. Just this idea should be considerered stupid, is like saying every software is distributed in a Docker container. It's a great way to waste disk space, and also RAM since shared library are no longer really shared...

You can have software that update automatically also with debs, where is the problem? Unattended upgrades exists since decades, you install it, and it updates all your packages automatically.

You can even have proprietary software packaged in .deb packages, why not, if for Canonical that is a concern. You can even have software that runs in a container packaged as a .deb package, why not?

Snap has no real purpose to me.

Flatpack is something that makes more sense, since it aims at providing a way to package software for multiple distributions, doesn't really need a runtime, a daemon like snap, but it builds application bundles that you double click and run, without installing them.

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

#186

Post by m45t3r »

finnjohnsen2 wrote: post #10

this is one of those; ignorance is bliss. i havent noticed snap being slower and now I risk noticing and getting annoyed over it.

Yeah, startup times is something that you don't really notice until you have a system that is really fast and responsive, and them you simply get annoyed by when you're using a system with slow startup times again or get accustomed again with the slowness.

Startup times didn't bother me too much, but nowadays it does, specially for things that my brain assumes that should be fast. This is why, for example, both my Neovim and Zsh configuration is tuned to start in 

    time zsh -c exit
    zsh -c exit  0.00s user 0.00s system 84% cpu 0.007 total


    time nvim -c qall
    nvim -c qall  0.07s user 0.02s system 100% cpu 0.081 total
It does makes a massive difference, for example spawning a new shell is instantaneous and when I know that I will make some small changes I much prefer to open a file in Neovim than Emacs (my main editor/IDE nowadays).

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

#187

Post by mrweasel »

tom_devref wrote: post #104

I really dislike the way snaps create disk partitions. When I run $ df I want to see what I defined during OS installation, not a dozen nasty snap mounts. An application misusing fundamental system features like this feels like a violation of some UNIX principle.

Very much agreed, the fact that nobody at Ubuntu noticed that the extra mount points is a best annoying is kinda impressive.

I’m not blaming Ubuntu, nor Snaps for this issue, but we had a new server come online and our monitoring noticed that two or three partition was already at 100% usage. Those where snap mount point.

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

#188

Post by finnthehuman »

ordinaryperson wrote: post #12

Maybe I'm in the minority but I like Snaps. I wish all software would auto-update silently in the background -- when's the last time you even thought about upgrading Chrome? The author of this article claims it's too difficult to find Flatpak apps and that the Ubuntu software center prioritizes Snaps over .deb. Are platforms never allowed to migrate to a new standard? Why is it Canonical's fault that authors of indiv…

Snap is not auto-updating, auto-updating is not snap.

Snap is more than just an update system. Even if snap's only concern was auto-updating, it would still carry a set of implementation decisions regarding auto-updating and it's irresponsible to rhetorically treat criticism/praise of an implementation as inseparable from the concept in general.

>from a distance to me this resembles the systemd vs init controversy.

Yes, people are again playing fast and loose with the distinction between features, and holistic analysis of systems that implement those features.

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

#189

Post by majewsky »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #150
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…

Microsoft did have a choice. They could simply have hidden the disable auto update (and telemetry for that matter!) somewhere deeper in the OS where non-techie users will never find it. Or even a registry key or whatever.

Windows has a long history of tech-illiterate users downloading optimizer tools from shady websites that mess with registry keys and break stuff in surprising ways. And it's always Microsoft who gets the blame, not the shady utility. From that POV, I can understand Microsoft being reserved about gating this kind of stuff behind registry keys. These days, you can only do this stuff with group policies if I'm not mistaken, a feature that regular home users don't have access to.

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

#190

Post by lonelappde »

vageli wrote: post #75
ordinaryperson wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so there was an image orientation bug in that specific release of Chrome. But it's estimated there are 1 billion users of Chrome. One billion! How wide of an attack surface does that present? Or how much of a nightmare would it be if they were all on wildly different versions? I get that this specific bug may have caused problems for you. But if I had to choose between security and compatibility for 1 billion sof…

> But if I had to choose between security and compatibility for 1 billion software users vs an occasional image orientation bug, This is a disingenuous characterization of my argument. The image orientation bug was a simple example. Further, why can't there be some kind of compromise where security updates are automatically applied and feature updates are not (of course I understand that the line can get blurry)? Las…

Maintaining forks of old versions is expensive and error prone.
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