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

Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 624 posts

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#411

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

beardbound wrote: post #378
Iolaum wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved from Ubuntu to Fedora when Canonical started pushing snaps 4 years after the auto update debacle that's also mentioned elsewhere here. Couldn't be happier. Key differences I noticed: - apt vs dnf - Intalling on a new computer. Would totally recommend.

I’ve been considering switching and haven’t used fedora in years. I’ll have to give it another chance. Snap has seriously annoyed me.

Just be aware that Fedora's got a six-month release cycle rather than whatever Ubuntu's LTS lifetime is (4 years?), and Fedora only supports current release and one back. So realistically, you've got a year a month to upgrade your workstation.

I've had Fedora for over five years and I've never had my laptop get completely borked by an upgrade, but I've had just enough things break between releases in the past that I still get get the sweats every time I've gotta do the restart upgrade, whether it will come up completely and just work or whether my WiFi is now broken because resolve-d changed to systemd-resolved.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#412

Post by bitcharmer »

CalRobert wrote: post #165
wilonth wrote: post #161

Wow they're still pushing snaps, the project with some the worst engineering I've ever seen. - Extremely slow at doing anything, even the most basic commands. - Ridiculous auto-update mechanism (you can't even disable it wtf). - Random, nonsense limitations (why can't I open dot files and dot directories???). So terrible that for most apps that I installed with snaps I end up installing the deb version later on. What…

Snaps are getting me off Desktop Ubuntu after 12 years of happily using it.

Same, my next OS reinstall will be Fedora and I've been a loyal Ubuntu user for the last 20 years. It takes around 20 seconds to start a silly Spotify client on my dual Xeon workstation with 64 GB of RAM. Numerous users reporting slow startup times but Canonical just pretend the problem doesn't exist and proceed to shove snap down everyone's throats like their lives depend on it.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#413

Post by t43562 »

dTal wrote: post #106
londons_explore wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of projects to semi-automatically produce packages for a large number of distributions starting from just a git repo of the software to package. Sure, packaging software is a bit of a thankless task, but with enough automation, packaging thousands of bits of software on every git commit should be doable by just a few volunteers.

What I would like to see is: 1) a unified database for package names (it's all unnecessarily ad-hoc right now, with different distros having different policies for capital letters, whether libraries are prefixed with "lib", whether python packages have "py" or "python" or "py3" etc... 2) a standard format for declaratively describing how to build a package. Basically, we have FreeBSD ports, Arch PKGBUILDs, Void templ…

You'll invent new standard and have N+1 standards.

It's not as if package formats can't be declarative - just that some issue always turns up in package X or Y that the declarative format didn't anticipate.

I think there may indeed be tools to convert these formats but in the end the devils are always in some distro-specific set of details that make life miserable. e.g. your library has some option enabled or doesn't and some other package in that distro needs it and so on and on.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#415

Post by smoldesu »

TobTobXX wrote: post #139
sandwell wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also a Nix/NixOS user/contributer. I feel like Nix+nixpkgs could become the universal packaging solution adapted to build deb, rpm, etc packages. Through nix-env it even already has the idea (albeit discouraged) of imperative package management like apt. Having spent a while with NixOS, running containers for user applications seems like using a cannon to kill a fly. The 'simple' alternative is to drop FHS altogether…

The one advantage Flatpak provides for me over Nix is containerisation. Not the bullet-proof kind, which allows you to run malware, but of the "reasonable" kind, which stops apps from storing to any directory they like just like that (only chroot level of "security"/isolation would be fine for me). When there's a package manager / runtime that does both then I'm extremely interested.

Looking things up, someone has linked the Flatpak containerisation tech (bubblewrap) into the Nix store: https://github.com/fgaz/nix-bubblewrap

It looks... somewhat abandoned, but I'd wager it still works today. Failing that, setting up a shell alias to launch a regular binary in bubblewrap isn't too hard either.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#416

Post by __david__ »

alias_neo wrote: post #321
sockaddr wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This also happened to me. So I decided to uninstall the snap and “apt install firefox” Guess what I got? A freaking snap. Yes, try it. I’m done with Ubuntu

It is possible to get an apt package, you have to jump through a few hoops but it can be done; I do it every time I install Ubuntu (frequently) because I won't touch that snap shite again. I can't move work off of Ubuntu; it's too embedded now, but I'm looking for something else for home. Switching distro-base isn't so easy when you've been using it for decades though; I tried NixOS but it wasn't comfortable (Nix is…

> Looking for a way to get a modern debian (something akin to non-LTS Ubuntu)

Not exactly sure what you mean by modern, but I'd recommend debian "unstable" (also called "sid"). Despite its name it's pretty stable. Normal debian stable releases are LTS style, unstable is where newly built packages show up first—so it will generally have the latest version of stuff and not be stuck a year or 2 back. It's basically a rolling-release style thing—I put in a little cron-job that does `aptitude safe-upgrade -y` every night to keep me up-to-date.

You can also use debian "testing", which one step back from "unstable"—packages are promoted from "unstable" to "testing" when if they've gone 2 weeks without a bug report of some particular severity (that I can't remember off the top of my head).

What's nice is you can have both testing and unstable in your apt sources—on my machine I set the priority on my testing higher than unstable so I generally get the testing packages, but I can grab unstable if I need to. I've been running this way for about 20 years now, and it seems the right balance of new but consistent.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#417

Post by cozzyd »

Filligree wrote: post #313
sockaddr wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This also happened to me. So I decided to uninstall the snap and “apt install firefox” Guess what I got? A freaking snap. Yes, try it. I’m done with Ubuntu

Fedora's really nice. Try it~ Alternately, I could shill for NixOS. It's also really nice. Eventually.

yes, I tried Ubuntu briefly in 2006 before switching to the Fedora/EL ecosystem since then. Fedora seems to have won every "battle" so far (systemd vs upstart, gnome-shell vs. unity, etc.)

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#418

Post by t43562 »

I see why software vendors don't want to have to target specific distributions if they can help it - it's expensive. I assume snaps and flatpaks try to mitigate that problem.

I wouldn't want it to be a very common solution really because it's not that efficient and means you get updates for security when that vendor feels like it.

I'm happiest with MOST software being in the distribution.

Anyhow I know there are lots of ways to look down on Arch/Pacman (Artix in my case - dinit instead of systemd) but I have to say that it is simply much more enjoyable to use than Ubuntu or Fedora or even Debian IMO. Perhaps one day some terrible thing will happen to make me regret it but I just cannot imagine going back to the horrible burdens of those distros - upgrading from one version to another (especially on Fedora - groan), selinux, snap Firefox etc

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#419

Post by GlumWoodpecker »

webkike wrote: post #400
eYrKEC2 wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me a noob if you like, but I don't like hunting down drivers. Tried to go to debian on my last dev machine upgrade, but reverted straight back to ubuntu. I may be lazy, but I really don't want to hunt down drivers. I'll try debian again next cycle.

I haven't had trouble with drivers using Fedora in years. RPM fusion handles Nvidia drivers just fine. It's a far cleaner and "noob friendly" distro in my opinion, so long as you're able to google "how to install nvidia drivers fedora"

This is mostly just a Debian problem, due to their "no non-free software" philosophy, which extends to device drivers. I have never in my days booted a Debian install that worked with wifi out of the box, and I suspect I never will, due to that philosophy.. For that reason, I've stopped trying and I default to Ubuntu (-based) distros instead. All it takes to get rid of snaps forever is `sudo apt purge snapd`.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#420

Post by five82 »

friend_and_foe wrote: post #263
sockaddr wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This also happened to me. So I decided to uninstall the snap and “apt install firefox” Guess what I got? A freaking snap. Yes, try it. I’m done with Ubuntu

Everyone's done with Ubuntu. It's just not good. Its got a stereotype at this point for being the easy noob distro but that's not even true. Its top to bottom awful and has been for many years.

Canonical makes decisions based on their own self interest. Not for their users and not for the benefit of the greater community. That's what drove everyone away.
Post reply on HN