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

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

jatan.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 645 posts

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

#411

Post by lucb1e »

paines wrote: post #254
wegs wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any stable way to go Ubuntu -> Debian? I don't want testing. Stable is fine. I find each version of Ubuntu worse than the previous. It's change for the sake of change, and as in this case, something really thoughtful like .deb gets replaced with something which appears slapped together poorly. I just want a stable, working system, and Ubuntu seems to no longer be the way to have that.

Set your system up to have like 90% of the available disk space for /home. Rest is root. You can replace your whole system within half an hour.

Personally, and I'm not new to this, I find these partitioned setups to be quite a pain. On server systems I can see the point of limiting /var/log and /tmp and such, but on simple desktops, I only know of people dreading the decision to go with that historical setup instead of one big root.

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

#412

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

_lbaq wrote: post #355
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree entirely. Unavoidable updates were one of the key factors in my choice to avoid Windows 10 for business-critical computing. I standardized on Ubuntu instead, but this could be a deal-breaker for me. I hope Canonical fixes this immediately. I'm not eager to spend time re-researching to market for a suitable OS.

Just disable snapd after you have achieved your ideal configuration. But yes, this should be a setting somewhere...

Thanks, that's helpful.

Another huge differentiator for Ubuntu over Windows was that I didn't think the OS vendor was trying to seize control of my computer. Canonical jeopardized that trust with this choice. I truly hope they take steps to restore it. I don't want the added work of switching OSs.

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

#415

Post by emilsedgh »

Firehawke wrote: post #387
nromiun wrote: post #285

> Snap applications auto-update and that’s fine if Ubuntu wants to keep systems secure. But it can’t even be turned off manually. OMG. Is this real? This is the exact reason I use Linux instead of Windows 10 or macOS. I am not a grandma who can't stay up to date on tech news. At the least there should be a toggle for power users. But no, you can only defer it. Am I the only one who doesn't like it when your already s…

I wonder how this affects offshoot distros like kubuntu? I'm currently on Debian with KDE, but I think I might need to move to a rolling release distro due to some issues with SMB/CIFS (that have already been fixed in newest builds of KDE) that probably won't be fixed in Debian until the next release. Maybe I should start looking at distros in general-- but Ubuntu is definitely out of the picture.

Give KDE Neon a try. It's based on latest Ubuntu LTS with up to date KDE. But it doesn't do everything like Ubuntu (like forcing snaps).

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

#416

Post by Izkata »

neetfreek wrote: post #379
m-p-3 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that point I'll just use Debian.

It's dawning on me that it's likely to only become more of a pain with each iteration of upgrades (e.g. install tweaks, synaptic, remove apport... And now remove snaps). Time to check out Debian! *Edited. I can't type on phones.

Other threads have suggested various relatively-new distros as alternatives when stuff like this keeps coming up with Ubuntu. The two I have in mind to check out at some point in the future are Pop!_OS and Void Linux.

Pop! is Ubuntu-based, so no idea of the situation with all these other problems, but it intrigues me because they're doing tiling windows first-class.

My understanding of Void is that it doesn't use snaps or systemd, making the system as a whole significantly easier to understand, and simply sounds much much closer to what I want out of a computer (and much like 8.04 was when I first switched to Ubuntu).

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

#417

Post by bragh »

gfxgirl wrote: post #280
jorams wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft didn't have a choice. Given an option regular users will never update their computers I think this is a misconception. A few weeks ago I was updating my Windows 7 install that hadn't booted for a year or so. I opened Windows Update. It looked for updates, and found some. I clicked the update button. It proceeded to start downloading, by which I mean it would hang for 1 to 2 minutes and then download very…

45 to 90 mins to update my Macs. They might not reboot 5 to 10 times but it's not quick. 19.04 Ubuntu just died on me today (I know some expert could have gotten in working). Apparently 19.04 support ended and someone took down the servers. So trying to update would tell me something about the servers having no release file. And they wouldn't let me update to 20.04 until I patched 19.04. I never modded anything. What…

> I searched the net for answers but my search foo sucked.

Do not feel bad about it at all: somehow it seems impossible to search for answers related to Ubuntu. Anything related is for something like 14.* or 12.* releases. I do not understand what is going on: are people really not asking the questions for newer versions, both Google and DDG not properly ranking or are the questions/answers getting somehow marked as dupe and deleted?

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

#418

Post by lucb1e »

darren0 wrote: post #143
ohazi wrote: post #115

If you're looking for an alternative to Ubuntu but want to stick with a Debian-based distribution, I'll continue to recommend Debian testing. It's a rolling release, so you don't have to stop what you're doing every 6 months - 3 years to install a huge update that changes the way everything works. It's more stable than the name would suggest, as long as you follow a few reasonable best-practices [1]. Software availab…

I tried going this route and the desktop experience was rough. Debian doesn't seem to have reasonable defaults for fonts so I spent way too much time learning and configuring all the font systems. So literally just the font configuration was enough for me to switch back to Ubuntu and just only install the stuff I like (no snap, gnome).

> Debian doesn't seem to have reasonable defaults for fonts

When was this? I can confirm that it breaks from time to time but usually that means I haven't rebooted for four months and by restarting everything, it all works again. I never needed to dive into the font system at all while using Debian stable or testing in the past 5+ years with Cinnamon as DE. (Firefox, not from the repositories, being the exception where one might need to toggle gfx.canvas.azure.backends in about:config.)

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

#419

Post by stephenr »

nromiun wrote: post #380
konart wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is the exact reason I use Linux instead of Windows 10 or macOS Not sure about win10, but macOS won't autoupdate apps if you turned it off. If the app is not from an app store - it's up to the devs to have option to (auto) update. Most apps allow you to turn autoupdate off (in fact I can't think of single one without this option)

This is from another user in this thread: > I've used both Windows and OSX for my professional work and while Windows is the worst offender when it comes to automatic updates, OSX is pretty horrible as well. At least with Windows you can expect some sort of backwards compatibility, while on OSX, one day you have to upgrade your entire OS, otherwise Notes or some stupid application won't launch. - capableweb I used to…

You can turn off auto updates of macOS and Mac App Store apps completely, yes.

I stayed on Mojave for months after Catalina was released and I had a MAS app that broke compatibility with the same companies own (abandoned) self-hosted server software so I just didn’t update it. I’ve since resorted to running that single app (and the abandoned server app) in a High Sierra VM.

The only version issues I know of that sound like what that other person referenced is:

If you update eg iOS to a new major version, sometimes iCloud-linked apps will say they need to upgrade something for new functionality (Notes specifically did this at least once in the last couple of years and iCloud Drive did it a few years ago).

But that is (a) not forced and (b) you’re told exactly what will happen (ie that older macs/iPhones won’t be able to use iCloud until they update too).

Some third party apps will set minimum required OS version (ie to use a new framework or api) but that doesn’t sound like what the other post was talking about?

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

#420

Post by ptx »

Barrin92 wrote: post #253
alerighi wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

There's flat out wrong stuff in this post. First off snap packages don't waste a lot of disk space because they avoid duplication of shared dependencies by using file hashes. Snap packages that need the same dependencies won't duplicate them. Secondly, snap works on pretty much all major distributions just like flatpak (for a list go here https://snapcraft.io/docs/installing-snapd ). One big advantage that snap has o…

> Snap packages that need the same dependencies won't duplicate them.

As long as they depend on exactly the same versions, right? This seems unlikely to happen by chance, without someone there to actively coordinate the versions, so there will still be substantial duplication.

Post reply on HN