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Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

kevin-custer.com

421–430 of 436 posts

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#421

Kudos to the OP, I'm glad this got posted on hacker news because Snap is so ridiculously broken. Since 16.04, Snaps have been a huge pain for me with running LXC in production environments. By default, Snap applies updates and restarts Systemd services anytime it likes, and there's no way to turn this behavior off! The only way to get around it is to download the Snap package binary and install that directly. Then Sn…

> By default, Snap applies updates and restarts Systemd services anytime it likes, and there's no way to turn this behavior off!

For context: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-for...

Snap developer responses are hilarious. No matter what your use case is, Snap developers know better than you, you silly irresponsible sysadmin/user. Snap is basically just another App store.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#422
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came to the realization that my home server doesn't need Ubuntu, it needs Debian.

I've thought of switching to Debian but I'd rather use a stripped-down Ubuntu so I can use PPAs.

Wait do PPAs not work on Debian?!

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#423
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People often complain about design decisions of the GNOME team: removing desktop icons, status bar, ...

Those people can choose another DE with legacy features like desktop icons. Tradition isn't a reason to keep up bad habits and I'm thankful to Gnome for daring to take tough decisions for the greater good. I wouldn't use any other DE, at this point.KDE has always been cluttered and XFCE is buggy and not particularly intuitive.

How is removing features "for the greater good"?

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#424

It seems like on recent Ubuntu installations some packages are provided by snaps (ie. "apt install XXX" will install a snap). I'd be interested in disabling this behaviour, if anyone knows.

Cies posted a link to https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-setup#remove-snap They give the suggestion to remove via sudo rm -rf /var/cache/snapd/ && sudo apt autoremove --purge snapd && rm -fr ~/snap And make sure it never installs again: sudo bash -c "cat > /etc/apt/preferences.d/no-snapd.pref"

Hmm, but then "apt install" would just fail because of an unresolved dependency right?

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#425
post #123

I've been using Ubuntu 20.04 for several weeks, almost since beta came out. The snap thing is a pain in the ass. I understand the need for something like snap or flatpak. I had software too new or too old that wouldn't work because some dependencies were not updated or were too new. Snaps can solve that by allowing the developers to provide everything you need (or everything you need that is not on your system). But…

actually dash-to-dock is working just fine for multiple monitors (and given the strange UI paradigm of Gnome basically a must have). The ubuntu-dock is just a none-configurable version of that. AND in 20.04 the full dash-to-dock just vanished...

Yeah, I had to reinstall one from source. https://github.com/home-sweet-gnome/dash-to-panel

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#426
Does anyone else use update-alternatives to install and maintain software? Takes a little setup work, mainly in scripting the soft links for binaries, but once done it’s a pretty clean way of managing software installations.

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man8/update-alter...

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#427
post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a nice workaround I guess.

I'd call it following the Unix philosophy instead of a workaround. > Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new "features". Both AppImage and Firejail do one thing and do it well, you can easily combine both and get what you want.

SELinux does the job better though if someone just configures it. AppImages should be confined automatically IMO.

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could equally say that all the hard work to make a viable OS is done by Linux, so screw Debian? No, you couldn't say that. Without toolchains, userlands, and packaging, a kernel is pretty worthless. The barest bones you can go is still gcc, linux, uclibc, and busybox. There is more code that goes into a computer running linux, then there is in the linux kernel. By a wide margin.

If it had to be done, GNU programs could all be replaced. Port BSD tools or improve busybox tools, use KDE instead of Gnome, and there is a variety of great packaging solutions that aren’t .deb. AFAIK GCC is already being replaced by clang due to the GCC codebase, amongst other reasons. Distros mostly use GNU programs for historical convenience. Given incentive, GNU could be dropped by Ubuntu for the desktop. The mos…

> The most popular Linux distro Android has moved away from GNU already.

Android went from non GNU absolutism to GNU LGPL for its standard java library a few years ago:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/android-n-switch...

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :(

You'll be happy to know Caddy will have a deb package in the next release (albeit not part of official debian repos), see https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/pull/3309

Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04

#430
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.

My response to "it's free" is "Here's a turd. SHUT UP IT'S FREE"

It's not an argument. It's freeness is a completely irrelevant property.

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