Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
kevin-custer.com
Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
1–10 of 436 posts
Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
#2Does Canonical have any 'push' motive for reducing dependence on apt? Or do they really just like snaps?
Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
#3One more thing if you installed on ZFS:
/var/snap is a subvolume. Purging snapd wants to remove the /var/snap directory, but it being mounted subvolume, it will fail. Purging snapd will therefore also fail.
Destroy (-r) the /var/snap subvolume before apt purge snapd.
Similarly, if using flatpak, create a new subvolume for /var/lib/flatpak before installing the first one. You don't need to snapshot your flatpaks together with the /.
Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
#4Does Canonical have any 'push' motive for reducing dependence on apt? Or do they really just like snaps?
I think they just realized it gives them a way to package proprietary apps like Skype, Spotify, and Slack a bit more simply than would be required to apt-ify/dpkg-ify them. I really think that's the primary motivation.
Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
#5Interesting but it raises the question of what the effects of removing those snap packages are? I note that he doesn't mention installing anything to replace them, so it's probably not serious but still...
Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
#6Kudos 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 Snap won't "know" where to get updates.
(Caveat emptor: "Workarounds" like this can easily lead to a bad security scenario, since any critical security patches won't be installed by any standard system update process)
Did I mention that a fair percentage of the time the Snap updates would leave LXC in a completely broken state? In production (and development, too)!
The final nail in the coffin in this scenario comes in the form of Snap being the official recommended way to install LXC. I don't know if Stéphane and friends even publish Debian packages anymore.
I get the idea behind snap and appreciate it, but the lack of configurability and no clear definition of what stable really even means . . .
Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
#7Does Canonical have any 'push' motive for reducing dependence on apt? Or do they really just like snaps?
Snaps have benefits. Canonical sells 5 year service subscriptions in addition to the 5 years they already offer for free on LTS. Snaps enable a way to get the latest VSCode and other apps on very old versions of Ubuntu. Snaps allowed me to try out Debian and Fedora with minimal issues and easily integrate them into my dotfile manager with Ansible.
Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
#8Does Canonical have any 'push' motive for reducing dependence on apt? Or do they really just like snaps?
I think they just realized it gives them a way to package proprietary apps like Skype, Spotify, and Slack a bit more simply than would be required to apt-ify/dpkg-ify them. I really think that's the primary motivation.
I don't know about Spotify, but both Skype and Slack are distributed with private apt repositories and it works just fine.
Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
#9Does Canonical have any 'push' motive for reducing dependence on apt? Or do they really just like snaps?
I think they just realized it gives them a way to package proprietary apps like Skype, Spotify, and Slack a bit more simply than would be required to apt-ify/dpkg-ify them. I really think that's the primary motivation.
And it's a pretty good one since the experience with having a large catalog of useful software in Flatpaks has been awesome and largely seamless. I just wish Canonical wasn't off doing their own thing or had started out in the open from the start so it would have a chance of being a useful standard instead of the weird Canonical store.
Re: Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
#10Does Canonical have any 'push' motive for reducing dependence on apt? Or do they really just like snaps?
Snaps have benefits. Canonical sells 5 year service subscriptions in addition to the 5 years they already offer for free on LTS. Snaps enable a way to get the latest VSCode and other apps on very old versions of Ubuntu. Snaps allowed me to try out Debian and Fedora with minimal issues and easily integrate them into my dotfile manager with Ansible.
It's super super nice to have a real system for dealing with "pet" applications that users want to be updated outside of the distribution release cycle.