91–100 of 198 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Super users should be using Debian. Not being snarky.
I'd expect users who go into Debian expecting some power-user version of Ubuntu to be disappointed. To be happy on Debian, you need to adopt their philosophy that stability is better than having the latest-and-greatest. For those unfamiliar, Debian releases come out about once every two years, at which point all software in Debian's repositories is frozen at its current version. Software receives security updates bet…
I had been an Ubuntu user for almost 16 years, on servers, laptops, and recently containers. The snap situation with Ubuntu is just plain unpalatable, both in principal and in practice. I became so disappointed in the move by Canonical that I finally left Ubuntu altogether and no longer recommend it to friends and colleagues. It takes years to cultivate a garden, but only minutes to destroy it.
If any Canonical employee is around here they should be taking notes or this will blow in their face like Upstart, Mir, Unity 8, etc. Or maybe Shuttleworth doesn't care at all and he just wants the big bucks from MS.
It's always the same, you hear people complaining the most.
Ubuntu has been a success because they took some risk.
The first one has been to make installing proprietary drivers easy. Something they got a lot of heat for.
And since they managed to become the most popular Linux distro ever, I think critics should maybe ask themselves why.
Largest issue I have with Snap is that it appears to assume the owner of a system is not in best position to make choices for their own systems. Sure, this might be true for the average user, but it is toxic to the “super user” community that’s in the best position to help support the larger community and may end up pushing them away. Snap at the very least should have an opt-out feature, if not be opt-in during an i…
There is an opt out feature: diversity. You can always use only the system package manager, or use a distro that doesn't use snap. All those complaints feel so moot. It's really hard to be in FOSS nowaday: you can't make a move without your users judging you all along the way, because a lot of them are idealists that expect a lot from you, yet don't think about the non tech saavy users. It's way easier to make propri…
Why on Earth would you think that users of proprietary software don't criticize it? I'm pretty sure that Windows gets more criticism than Ubuntu...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then snaps could be the solution for proprietary software, not for regular software.
Statistically, proprietary software is regular software. But yeah, snaps is a great solution for that, espacially because getting a non FOSS software is not possible in official distro repos, and hosting your own repo is HARD. And that's what's happening. I installed Telegram using a snap because of this.
Statistically, proprietary software in the world of Linux is a black swan. Free software is the rule, proprietary software the exception to the rule which tends to be used only when there are no alternatives.
Devils advocate: it is plain weird for every app I install to have so much file system and system access. It’s nice to have a sandboxed solution built in. It would be nice if it was a solution that didn’t have the problems that this article listed, but snaps could be adapted to be good with a few changes. Why a proprietary backend though? I suppose cannonical views packaged apps as a platform opportunity and wants to…
> Devils advocate: it is plain weird for every app I install to have so much file system and system access. It’s nice to have a sandboxed solution built in. It would be nice if it was a solution that didn’t have the problems that this article listed, but snaps could be adapted to be good with a few changes. Exactly. Personally I have been sticking my desktop programs into "firejail"-managed "containers" for a long ti…
Couldn't you just make a "default-firejail" package that installs the symlinks to firejail somewhere that's before the default install install location in your path? And maybe consider installing that in the base install, but that potentially risks breaking things unexpectedly for users.
I think there are some very good critiques of snap (performance, provenance, reproducibility, namespacing, etc), and the first couple points in this article seem reasonable. However I can't agree with this: > apt/deb is a wonderful package management system and everyone is happy with it, at least the majority of Ubuntu/Debian users. Besides, dnf/rpm is also a similar packaging system for Fedora/RH systems and everyon…
You people do realize that snaps have been around for 4 years right? It has widespread first party support from various companies including Microsoft, Amazon, Mozilla, Google, Spotify, JetBrains etc... They have wide spread adoption with almost 10x the install base of Flatpaks. Do you guys really need to keep throwing blogs at something which isn't going away and is useful to users? How is this useful in anyway? Cano…
> Do you guys really need to keep throwing blogs at something which isn't going away and is useful to users? Do you really want the answer to that... There are people who would loudly insist that there should be nothing but a kernel and Stallman's FAQ.
Literally nobody says that. Not even RMS says that.
Unfortunately, snap comes with all of these extra issues that happen when the developer isn't empathizing with the user. Also, much to my chagrin, snaps don't actually uninstall cleanly, and can really hoop your system. I now install snaps INSIDE of an LXC container so that snap can't misbehave and break my system, or else if I can I just use apt with a custom repo (for docker because the snap is awful). Ubuntu 20.04 will probably be my last Ubuntu system, and that's a shame... I really liked it.
Devils advocate: it is plain weird for every app I install to have so much file system and system access. It’s nice to have a sandboxed solution built in. It would be nice if it was a solution that didn’t have the problems that this article listed, but snaps could be adapted to be good with a few changes. Why a proprietary backend though? I suppose cannonical views packaged apps as a platform opportunity and wants to…
> it is plain weird for every app I install to have so much file system and system access
A quick glance at Wikipedia to make sure I'm not talking out of my ass seems to confirm that:
> is a Linux kernel security module that allows the system administrator to restrict programs' capabilities with per-program profiles. Profiles can allow capabilities like network access, raw socket access, and the permission to read, write, or execute files on matching paths. [...] AppArmor is enabled by default in Debian 10 (Buster) [from July 2019].
(Also, I'm not a fan of claiming "devil's advocate" when you're saying something that you know everyone will agree with. It's similar to saying "downvote me all you want but [insert popular HN opinion]". Of course the principle of lease privilege for software is something lauded by every logically thinking person.)