Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

kevin-custer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 436 posts

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#401

Post by sneak »

Razengan wrote: post #330
sneak wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for letting me know. It looks like the telemetry (kuserfeedback) isn’t even a dep of the Gentoo plasma-meta metapackage, so I don’t think it was even built on my system (but will double check when not on mobile). If I dabble with debian or kubuntu I will make sure to mitigate it, thank you for making it known, keep up this kind of good work! It’s a real shame that they found it necessary to even build a teleme…

> all the phone-home that Catalina STILL does even with iCloud, Siri, analytics/crashes, Screen Time, iMessage/FaceTime, Location Services, ntp, App Store, and software update all disabled. Do you have examples of what you mean?

I have a bunch of Little Snitch screenshots around here somewhere, but it is easy to reproduce: do a fresh install on spare machine or VM (opt out of all services like iCloud, Siri, Location, MAS, et c), install Little Snitch, and then disable the built-in Little Snitch silent allow rules for “system services/iCloud” or whatever it’s called. Reboot and observe.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#402

Post by urlwolf »

coleifer wrote: post #49

Canonical always has tried to differentiate themselves, and they just can't execute. Remember Unity, Mir, Juju, upstart and all the other failed shit they've come out with? Snap is just more of the same. I don't want to run that garbage on my desktop. I don't need more daemons and forced auto-updates and all the baggage. I strongly recommend anyone similarly frustrated to check out debian, which is a fantastic distro…

Mint is also a possibility. They don't use snaps but flatpaks.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#403

Post by nikisweeting »

simosx wrote: post #243
nikisweeting wrote: post #24

Semi-related: does anyone know how to install microk8s via apt without snap?

Packaging and maintaining microk8s is a significant effort to do with apt. You are asking if someone managed to do all the work to package microk8s and keep managing it as a deb package.

I don't necessarily need an "all-in-one" package, I'd be ok with a 30min tutorial on installing all the components manually.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#404

Post by jlgaddis »

theossuary wrote: post #114
_jal wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess users have been sufficiently beaten into submission that many of them will put up with software randomly quitting on them, but the idea that daemons should be snaps is doubly crazy. "Oh, Tomcat just updated itself, that's why we were down." I really have no idea what people are thinking sometimes.

I always resisted running Ubuntu in production, even when it was much easier to install the necessary software. When you pick a distro, you're picking their packaging and maintainer culture. I've always prefered CentOS for that reason. Even the little things, like installing a new package won't start/enable the services (because you should have a chance to configure it first) always came off as more pragmatic for sys…

I run Debian on my workstation and laptops but still prefer to use CentOS/RHEL on my servers.

The automatic startup of newly installed services (before you even have the opportunity to configure them) on Debian (and derivatives) has always bothered me and is a (small) factor in my decision.

Fortunately, there are a few "workarounds" to prevent newly installed services from being automatically started!

First, there's the brute-force / heavy-handed approach -- override the systemd presets [0] to set all services to disabled by default:

  $ cat /etc/systemd/system-preset/00-disable-all-services.preset
  disable *
Alternatively, as a one-time thing, you can "mask" the service before installing the package but this requires you to manually create the symlink (instead of using "systemctl mask") -- and requires you to know the name of the service unit beforehand:

  $ ln -s /dev/null /etc/systemd/system/nginx.service
  $ apt install nginx
  # ... configure nginx as desired ...
  $ systemctl enable nginx
  $ systemctl start nginx
Finally, there's the old, "sloppy" (IMO) method of "hacking" the /usr/sbin/policy-rc.d script to immediately exit with a status code of 101 ("action forbidden") [1].

(I'd recommend avoiding the latter entirely and going with whichever of the first two options better suits your needs.)

---

EDIT: Just remembered another method but I'm not sure if it still works:

  $ RUNLEVEL=1 apt install nginx
---

[0]: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.pre...

[1]: https://people.debian.org/~hmh/invokerc.d-policyrc.d-specifi...

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#405

Post by cies »

trystero wrote: post #98
cies wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keepass as a snap because security right /s. This is an actual piece of software that has a history of being modded by attackers to steal credentials. Why would you put that in a snap?

May I ask what history you're speaking of? (also note that KeepassXC is a fork of Keepass)

Any Keepass (or similar) software, it should run as predictable as possible. I know this software was once offered with a trojan loaded on some download website, but just searched around and could not find anything about it. Maybe the maintainers remember.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#406

Post by tribaal »

francislavoie wrote: post #388
CameronNemo wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian is a bad choice if you want to package go applications (or rust apps, for that matter). Debian requires that all those little static dependencies be individually packaged. Common container software like lxd, podman, and umoci are not found in Debian. The following distributions package LXD (that I know of): * Void Linux * Alpine Linux * Arch Linux * Gentoo Some of those are more suitable for production install…

Do you happen to know _why_ Debian decided to require that for Go projects? It's so absurdly complicated. I've been looking into .deb packaging for Caddy but it really feels like they require us to jump through too many hoops to make it happen. I'd much rather just ship a prebuilt binary.

I would love a deb-packaged Caddy as well :(

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#407

Post by dingo_bat »

unethical_ban wrote: post #146
coleifer wrote: post #49

Canonical always has tried to differentiate themselves, and they just can't execute. Remember Unity, Mir, Juju, upstart and all the other failed shit they've come out with? Snap is just more of the same. I don't want to run that garbage on my desktop. I don't need more daemons and forced auto-updates and all the baggage. I strongly recommend anyone similarly frustrated to check out debian, which is a fantastic distro…

Unity was a good DE, and I have come to appreciate their design, which even today differentiates from standard GNOME. Also recall that it was made to be one DE for all: Phone, tablet, desktop. The idea was that you would have an Ubuntu phone, dock it, and use it as your PC! And that is doable now, considering Thunderbolt. Hell, Oneplus should try to push OxygenOS to be tablet-like and this would set them apart from e…

Dex is pretty mature now.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#408

Post by ric2b »

guiambros wrote: post #253
stefan_ wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Snap team has some experience with this, seeing as how 20.04 has released and you still can't move the fricking ~/snap folder . Creating some generically named top-level folder in the users home directory is a straightforward fuck you to all users. Since 2017: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1575053

This. Came here to post the same bug. I've been following the thread for the last 3 years, and it's an absolute mess. I feel bad for the maintainers; it must be difficult to deal with all the rude and borderline disrespectful comments -- and particularly for something you're donating your time for free after all. But I must say that the architectural decision of creating a ~/snap was a colossal mistake.

Are they really donating their time, aren't they Canonical employees? Canonical being a company that is paid mostly by companies that use their distro in production?

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#409

Post by Avamander »

InternetOfStuff wrote: post #265
ressetera wrote: post #65

Snaps are great for auto updating software, especially the ones from JetBrains. I think most users will be fine. Those of us who need more fine grained control, can have it.

Chromium silently moved to a snap package some weeks ago. Annoying but harmless: it's start time has multiplied. Workflow-breaking: Chromium now can't see my NFS mounts anymore. It's not just about having a pretty home directory.

Workflow-breaking: KDE integration, Estonian eID signing and GooPG plugins don't work, also data loss when Chromium updates and you have it open

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#410

Post by dingo_bat »

favadi wrote: post #300

I don't understand the need to remove it, if you don't like snap, just ignore it and don't install anything from it. There is no harm keeping them instlaled, right?

Although minimal, but the base snap installation does consume disk space. I also think they have a daemon running to help with updates.
Post reply on HN