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

jatan.blog

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

#431
post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 10 has an out of the box feature to mark connections as metered which disables automatic updates.

On Ethernet which ultimately has a cellular uplink?

Yes, but this is something that needs to be set.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4028458/windows-met...

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

#432
post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We work at remote sites on cell connections. Part of the reason we moved to Ubuntu from Windows was the ability to control data usage, which is expensive. Automatic updates quickly become a significant slice of the bill when random decisions like these get pushed on users. Ubuntu was supposed to help prevent us from needing to chase this.

Windows 10 has an out of the box feature to mark connections as metered which disables automatic updates.

> which disables automatic updates.

Except for the ones Microsoft thinks are really important to push to you.

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

#433

> 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…

We work at remote sites on cell connections. Part of the reason we moved to Ubuntu from Windows was the ability to control data usage, which is expensive. Automatic updates quickly become a significant slice of the bill when random decisions like these get pushed on users. Ubuntu was supposed to help prevent us from needing to chase this.

Windows lets you set your network connection as metered, and doing so prevents it from applying automatic updates.

I recently switched back to linux myself, but there are certain utilities and conveniences and options in Windows that linux distros don't yet provide, and ubuntu definitely is not meant to be light weight in any sense of the term. Is switching to something else an option at this point?

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

#434
post #421

I am very diligent about applying updates as soon as I'm able and generally read the changelogs of the updates I'm applying in Ubuntu's Software Updater. One thing I will not do is willingly allow somebody else a way to deploy and execute code on my computer without my say so (which snap is). After reading the whole thread at https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-for... and seeing Gustavo Niemeyer'…

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

#435
post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 10 has an out of the box feature to mark connections as metered which disables automatic updates.

> which disables automatic updates. Except for the ones Microsoft thinks are really important to push to you.

Really? I spent a year with that on (satellite for awhile, then 4g lye data) and never saw an update automatically go through.

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

#436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, but why is the problem FRR not addressing bugs it may be auto releasing and instead the entire principle of auto-updates in general? If we agree that auto-updates on the whole improve security for the platform, why is that not a goal worth pursuing? Why are application devs totally blameless in releasing buggy software?

All software has bugs. Also, how are the application developers supposed to test for every single environment? In an ideal world, you could get away with pushing all updates automatically, but I for one would rather not get my production server get totalled because of a botched update. *edit to fix question mark

I think Windows updates illustrates your point nicely.

Microsoft are a vast organisation and do a huge amount of testing before pushing updates, yet time after time, there are reports of serious issues with updates.

As a software developer myself, I completely understand the desire to have consumers running the latest version - but I also recognise that real world users have different workloads, different levels of acceptable risk, and different consequences when things go wrong.

I think automatic updates probably are the best thing for most desktop users, and for some server users but certainly not for everyone all of the time - I don't even mind if auto update is the default, but make it clear and give people a config option where they can control updates themselves!

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

#437
post #411
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's been completely painless for me for years. I've got it set up pretty much exactly as the grandparent described: 50 GB partition mounted at /, 600 GB partition mounted at /home. The graphical installer has made this easy since ~forever.

The only pain I can come up with is that I'm wasting about 20 GB, because the operating system doesn't actually need 50 GB. So maybe not a great solution for people who have to do with Laptop with a non-replaceable 128 GB SSD. But 20 GB is not a big deal to me.

The upside is that I've done clean Ubuntu reinstalls two or maybe three times since then, and my data was a non-issue, just reassign the existing partitions and don't format /home. I'd estimate it takes rather less than the 30 minutes the paines refers to, and I always grin despite myself when Firefox restores the browser window as if nothing had happened.

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

#438
post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is snap somehow user-hostile? Yes, but more importantly it's insecure. The ease of typo-squatting is a real problem.

Isn't using the internet insecure then? I can typo bankname.example.nl as well. Not that I don't see your point: a curated list like the repositories is preferable to a system where anyone can claim any name, but I am not sure that this extrapolates to the statement that "it's insecure" as a whole. Out of interest (I don't use Ubuntu/snaps myself), is that really the case? Can I actually a publish without any checks…

> Can I actually a publish without any checks and, once I got half a million users by repackaging the deb file in snap, add some subtle malware? There is no review process or anything?

This is already possible with every other distribution method. If you host your own debs, then you can easily get them to do whatever you want. Even relying on the main archive isn't great - apt is typically delivered over HTTP to make mirroring easier, for example.

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

#439
I do not have an informed opinion on the different aspects of snaps, because I haven't had to deal with them at all.

That said, the feature "automatic updates whenever the system feels like it", is an annoyance for me, even if I can defer them. Typing "sudo apt full-upgrade" takes a few seconds.

I just use Ubuntu Server and get only what I need, which is available through the APT repositories. I have not noticed these repositories getting any smaller in favor of snaps and I am already using the 20.10 development branch. The Ubuntu Server installer does not install any snaps by default. However, snapd is there but it is trivial to remove it if one wants to. Chromium is the only "loss" I have witnessed and I also saw this mentioned in other comments. Note that there exists a really nice PPA, maintained by Pop!_OS, that contains quite a few packages, including Chromium.

I am wondering what security issues do snaps address that apparmor, whose purpose is security, does not. I also think it is unfortunate that we need snaps to deal with different applications / packages needing different library versions...

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

#440
post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That... doesn't make sense. Chrome and Firefox (and possibly Chromium, I'm uncertain there) already can update out-of-band of apt/etc.

The idea is that the vendor can take care of the updates without having to go through all the package management system of all distributions

When you install Google Chrome for a deb, it's already set to update through Google's own apt repository. Presumably Firefox could do the same.
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