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Snaps. Why? Please Stop

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Re: Snaps. Why? Please Stop

#91
post #2

My concern is that a lot of laptops come with soldered in, non replaceable hard drives and all these sandboxed programs take up a lot of space. So if you buy cheap laptop with 256GB storage and start installing snap/flatpak/appimage eventually you’ll run out of disk storage and won’t be able to upgrade it (storage, that is). And the only solution is to buy upgradable laptop or a laptop with a lot of storage upfront.…

>is that a lot of laptops come with soldered in, non replaceable hard drives Other than Apples, which are those "a lot of laptops" that come with soldered storage?

Lenovo "ThinkPad" workstations, like the P16s.

Re: Snaps. Why? Please Stop

#92

snaps is starting to give me a headache. I installed chromium in my ubuntu and it installed it as a snap (even through apt, it just a transitional package that installs the snap.), and for some reason it has a dependency with cups (printing software). Every time i delete cups it is reinstalled..again and again, i couldn't find any solution.

Follow the instructions here, works for me: https://gist.github.com/lmmx/0550cfc8867eb1eea04076ec69c95a5...

Although cups has a hardwired dependency on libsnapd-glib1 so you can't remove that library, but the nosnap.pref file will prevent snapd from ever being installed again.

Re: Snaps. Why? Please Stop

#93
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the programs that you've had to install through snap? Or are you talking about the existence of snap on the system in general? Personally I have not a single snap packge installed, and am usually able to find sources for the programs I use elswhere than in the snap ecosystem.

Firefox is a snap by default

After Ubuntu moved Firefox to snap, I started using official tarballs for Firefox and Thunderbird.

Re: Snaps. Why? Please Stop

#94
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the programs that you've had to install through snap? Or are you talking about the existence of snap on the system in general? Personally I have not a single snap packge installed, and am usually able to find sources for the programs I use elswhere than in the snap ecosystem.

Firefox is a snap by default

I just use the Firefox ESR PPA instead.

Re: Snaps. Why? Please Stop

#95

The thing I hate most about snaps is how they pollute the mount namespace with loop mounts. Install a few apps and 2/3rds of your `mount` output will be /dev/loopX devices. Especially annoying since I often do loop-mounts myself and picking them out from the flood of unrelated snaps is a pain. If they could somehow hide the mounts (in a different mount namespace maybe?) that would be cool. I mean still, I would prefe…

I just jumped the ship to Nix.

You should rewrite everything in Rust too.

Re: Snaps. Why? Please Stop

#96

> Sure, Snaps make it easy to install 3rd party software, but I just find this problematic, causing fragmentation, and just all around a bad idea. He knows the answer, he just doesn't like it for stupid ideological reasons.

For reasons, yes, perhaps even ideological reasons, but if you're going to call them stupid you should at least try to give a reason.

I would have thought it's obvious, but it's clearly stupid to expect all software vendors to package their software for every distro in existence. That's just not a realistic way to distribute software.

Re: Snaps. Why? Please Stop

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Surface Go is available in eMMC version. Yes I'm sure all the three Surface Go owners in the world will be devastated. >Basically anything under $700 has a chance to be an eMMC laptop. You must be joking. Maybe like sub 300 USD. I have a 700 Euro Laptop and it came with a 1TB NVME and most cheap sub 500 Euros laptops I find are all still with SSDs not eMMC. SSDs are now so cheap you'll find them everywhere instead o…

> Yes I'm sure all the three Surface Go Thankfully for Microsoft you and your hate are not the ones who buys Surface Go > You must be joking. Maybe like sub 300 USD Did you even bothered to check that Amazon link? With laptops at $500 clearly labeled having an eMMC storage? You must be joking. > SSDs are now so cheap And eMMC is cheaper . If it wasn't there would be no laptops with eMMC.

Just because you managed to hunt down some junky Emmc laptops by actively searching for them on Amazon doesn't mean anything.

How much percentage wise are they of total sales of laptops?

How many consumers actually buy them?

Those are important numbers, the statistics. Not your Amazon findings trying to spin it into an overexageration.

Emmc laptops are by no means a majority in consumers hands.

Re: Snaps. Why? Please Stop

#98

Snaps were one of the main reasons I moved from Mint to Ubuntu. Traditional package management is a terrible fit for modern systems and apps. If you have dozens of apps and they each have dozens of dynamically linked dependencies, you'll probably get an occasional compatibility issue. At first I really liked Flatpak, but the ecosystem isn't there. Everything I use is in Snapcraft, with Flatpak I still would occasiona…

In my experience - using Linux since 1992, Debian since 1997 - "traditional" package management is quite capable at avoiding compatibility issues related to dynamically linked dependencies. Linux has had library versioning for a very long time - something which made it stand out compared to the 'DLL Hell' Windows users were used to - and it is quite common to have multiple versions of libraries installed and in use. Given these conditions I do not consider package management a "terrible fit" for "modern systems and apps" - whatever those might be. I do see a use for systems like AppImage which come in handy for applications which are only used occasionally (or even only once) where the increased start-up time and reduced integration do not matter.

Re: Snaps. Why? Please Stop

#99
I had Debian installed. Wanted LXC and LXD. And it brought snapd with it. Immediately my server went from a load of 0.3 to 2.5+. Continuously for months. Snapd always in the top cpu. No idea why or what it did.

I finally caved and gave up on LXC. Removed it and snapd. Load immediately dropped to 0.5 again.

I. Hate. Snapd.

Re: Snaps. Why? Please Stop

#100
post #35

This is discussion at 2019-2021. There are many distros where snapd is not installed by default, including Linux Mint: https://snapcraft.io/docs/installing-snapd Nobody is forcing you to use distro that includes snapd by default. Snap has advantages for server software that are using Snap strict sandbox: - Strict sandbox does not allow read access outside of /var/snap/APPNAME/common . Only common directory is writeab…

Are there any advantages to using snap instead of docker for server software?

unless you have a lot of free time for debugging - none. We had a project where managment team force everyone to use snaps (cause of some weired company relations with Canonical) and guess what? They did not make it. I think we just wasted 6 months in order to get to be able to do stable prod releases with snaps and it felt like docker more mature and stable in every aspect. I guess that time and money could easily stream to do actually usefull things for end-users.
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