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Disabling automatic refresh for Snap from store

forum.snapcraft.io

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Re: Disabling automatic refresh for Snap from store

#181

Post by kd913 »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #179
kd913 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux users are some of the most opinionated people. At the end of the day, money/convenience matters. Why exactly would they pay attention to you when they have their own priorities? Snaps reduce reduce their maintenance burdens, and they have the stats themselves for how popular they are. They are by and far more used than flatpaks from what I remember from the video by Martin Wimpress. Oh and they have third party…

So according to a Snap developer, Snap is more popular on Ubuntu, the only distribution that comes with it preloaded. That does not say anything about Snap’s popularity. Vendor interest they have, community interest they lack. And if it continues, lack of community interest will result in a lack of vendor interest.

They literally have stats for each snap download and install.

https://snapcraft.io/slack

You see the map at the bottom with a list of OSes?

They have the interest, commercial and from the populace. Vendors have already integrated it into their pipelines.

What they don't have is the vocal minority. Frankly I don't get why people care so much, if you don't like it switch to something else. No need to whine about it online. They aren't preventing you from using flatpak.

Re: Disabling automatic refresh for Snap from store

#182

Post by indymike »

ethbr0 wrote: post #143
indymike wrote: post #91

Users are telling the snap team exactly what they want: give us a way to disable automatic updates. Snappy's vision is to take this control away. This is why people hate snaps. They don't fit user workflows, make extra work and even cause show stopping problems. Snaps could be great but the team really needs to listen. For me I'm removing snaps from my configs before I get surprised. (edit: mobile autocomplete typos)

It's the nature of creating a currated experience: saying "No" to a lot of things. Chrome/Google did the same thing. Snap clearly has a philosophy. And a lot of people clearly disagree with that philosophy. Thankfully, instead of "advertised from google.com", Snap has less ability to push itself on users, and users have more ability to choose it... or not.

>Snap clearly has a philosophy. And a lot of people clearly disagree with that philosophy.

Seems like that philosophy is the user is not to be trusted. The problem here is that users in reality, not just philosophically, CANNOT trust snap because it will force updates (or dns trickery to stop it) that may cause a system to stop working.

Re: Disabling automatic refresh for Snap from store

#183

Post by rubyist5eva »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #171
rubyist5eva wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just switched to Fedora about a week ago because I was getting fed up with user hostile Ubuntu bs, I like it a lot.

I don't like that you have to update it so often. I like the idea of an LTS. On systems I want to update often I just put arch on them so there is never major breakage that I can't roll back easily with snapper.

Each version of Fedora is supported for 14 months, so you can keep it a little behind but still get updates. They also will update the kernel so you’re getting updated hardware new support. With flatpak having up to date desktop applications is not an issue either. For development libraries I’m usually in some kind of a container with a fixed version, so updates shouldn’t much of an issue either.

For example I just installed Fedora 35, I will probably install 36 at some point after 37 comes out, and stay one release behind current. Major upgrades are still relatively safe because of FS snapshots. I just personally prefer a slightly slower pace than “bleeding edge all the time”.

For a server I would just put Alma/Rocky Linux on it.

Re: Disabling automatic refresh for Snap from store

#184

Post by gjsman-1000 »

kd913 wrote: post #181
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So according to a Snap developer, Snap is more popular on Ubuntu, the only distribution that comes with it preloaded. That does not say anything about Snap’s popularity. Vendor interest they have, community interest they lack. And if it continues, lack of community interest will result in a lack of vendor interest.

They literally have stats for each snap download and install. https://snapcraft.io/slack You see the map at the bottom with a list of OSes? They have the interest, commercial and from the populace. Vendors have already integrated it into their pipelines. What they don't have is the vocal minority. Frankly I don't get why people care so much, if you don't like it switch to something else. No need to whine about it onl…

In what world do unlabeled graphs count as stats? There’s also no counter for how many downloads there were, or any other useful statistic. They are just bars of various lengths with no explanation on what the lengths actually mean.

> Frankly I don't get why people care so much, if you don't like it switch to something else. No need to whine about it online. They aren't preventing you from using flatpak.

Then, in that case, by that logic, there’s no reason for you to whine about my whining.

Re: Disabling automatic refresh for Snap from store

#185

Post by MiddleEndian »

rsolva wrote: post #132
MiddleEndian wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 flat…

I'm not even tech illiterate (I used to work at Microsoft!) and I was thrown off by the fullscreen Office365 ads they added around 2019. The shortcut was just "all of your modifier keys" so it got activated randomly when I picked up my keyboard by the corner and it took me a bit to track that down. Think I had to fix it with a registry key. It's fucking nonsense and it's really no mystery why users don't want automatic updates.

Re: Disabling automatic refresh for Snap from store

#186

Post by ethbr0 »

indymike wrote: post #182
ethbr0 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the nature of creating a currated experience: saying "No" to a lot of things. Chrome/Google did the same thing. Snap clearly has a philosophy. And a lot of people clearly disagree with that philosophy. Thankfully, instead of "advertised from google.com", Snap has less ability to push itself on users, and users have more ability to choose it... or not.

>Snap clearly has a philosophy. And a lot of people clearly disagree with that philosophy. Seems like that philosophy is the user is not to be trusted. The problem here is that users in reality, not just philosophically, CANNOT trust snap because it will force updates (or dns trickery to stop it) that may cause a system to stop working.

Snap's philosophy appears to be: Given the option to not patch, users will not patch. And this is even worse in IoT land.

Which I can't say is wrong.

Who probably shouldn't use Snap are users with mature patch application skills, who are willing the invest the time to review and patch regularly.

That class of users is far smaller than {all users}.

Re: Disabling automatic refresh for Snap from store

#187

Post by tapoxi »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #146
chousuke wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend Fedora to everyone wanting a desktop alternative to Ubuntu. It's a well-balanced distribution that is opinionated enough to work fine as-is but doesn't try to force things on you the way Ubuntu does with snaps.

What DEs are common/supported on Fedora, I use KDE (Kubuntu), I'm not keen on snaps and so it seems expedient to switch distros when I next install (as it seems Ubuntu are all in for snaps).

You want Kinoite: https://kinoite.fedoraproject.org/ it's Fedora's equivalent of Kubuntu. I'm a GNOME user but I've heard good things.

Re: Disabling automatic refresh for Snap from store

#188

Post by dralley »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #163
chousuke wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend Fedora to everyone wanting a desktop alternative to Ubuntu. It's a well-balanced distribution that is opinionated enough to work fine as-is but doesn't try to force things on you the way Ubuntu does with snaps.

I can't do that because I don't want to update every 6 months. If I wanted to do that I'd just move to arch/endeavour.

You don't _have_ to update every 6 months. Each release is supported for around 13 months so you can hop every 2 releases.

Re: Disabling automatic refresh for Snap from store

#189

Post by dralley »

rubyist5eva wrote: post #183
stjohnswarts wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like that you have to update it so often. I like the idea of an LTS. On systems I want to update often I just put arch on them so there is never major breakage that I can't roll back easily with snapper.

Each version of Fedora is supported for 14 months, so you can keep it a little behind but still get updates. They also will update the kernel so you’re getting updated hardware new support. With flatpak having up to date desktop applications is not an issue either. For development libraries I’m usually in some kind of a container with a fixed version, so updates shouldn’t much of an issue either. For example I just i…

>Major upgrades are still relatively safe because of FS snapshots.

Also, in general the upgrades are quite reliable. I have a few systems that have been upgraded in-place for years without any issues (regardless of snapshots, since they're using ext4).

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