Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu
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Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu
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Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu
#2i recently upgraded ubuntu and had to start dealing with snaps.. of the two i tried to install they were both out of date and i ended up using apt to great success. what was the point of this thing?
Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu
#3i recently upgraded ubuntu and had to start dealing with snaps.. of the two i tried to install they were both out of date and i ended up using apt to great success. what was the point of this thing?
Someone looked up from his workstation, put a finger in the air and said: Containers are Cool, Windows 10 is cool, what if we made Containers like Windows 10 and then mounted them like Mac mounts installation files!
Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu
#4i recently upgraded ubuntu and had to start dealing with snaps.. of the two i tried to install they were both out of date and i ended up using apt to great success. what was the point of this thing?
> of the two i tried to install
Which two? I mean, a package is only as good as its curator. That sounds more like a complaint about Ubuntu's Snap update policy or the community support for whatever you were trying to install than anything about Snap.
I don't understand the fuss here. People who want control over the open source software they install still have it, it still works like it always has. People who don't care can't even tell the difference.
And in a handful of situations, like large apps with extensive dependencies, or externally managed builds, or needs for cross-distro binary compatibility, Snap has real and tangible advantages.
Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu
#5I 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.
Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu
#6I 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.
Linux Mint responded to the situation by removing snap from their repositories today[1]. I hope other distros will also follow suite.
[1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-mint-dumps-ubuntu-snap/
Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu
#7One of my big things with snap is how it locks the snap into the home directory. I get why they do that but it would be nice to override[1]. In my case I want to play audio files outside of my home directory but VLC doesn’t have access. And VLC now only updates the snaps and not it’s repos so you have to use the snaps.[2]
[1]https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1643706
Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu
#8I honestly like snaps. I like having spotify and discord working as to his other concerns I just don't care.
Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu
#9> The backend is proprietary.
GitHub is proprietary. I understand that some people don't accept that either. But if you accept and use GitHub, then you should have no problem with snaps on this basis.
Also, on this topic, consider this quote[1]:
"We did that experiment with Launchpad; the people who said they wouldn’t use it because it wasn’t open source were the same people promoting a closed source alternative. When we open sourced Launchpad, they said that they wouldn’t use it anyway because Canonical was the primary contributor."
I am not saying that Flatpak is proprietary. I am saying that the focus on the backend not having source available is specious.
> Developer controls the updates.
Users CAN defer updates (eg. because they're on a metered connection, or they only want to update on Patch Tuesdays, or whatever). However, in the default arrangement they cannot defer them indefinitely. But in today's Internet-connected world, refusing updates forever is also anti-social and unacceptable, so I don't see a great loss there. However you can manually install a snap such that it never updates[2].
> APT does a fantastic job as it is.
No, it doesn't. It is fantastic for distribution releases that don't change their dependency structure after release. It's terrible for shipping new software to an existing distribution release. This is seen both in packages that must have major updates frequently (eg. Firefox, which added a whole new Rust toolchain dependency that had to be backported into existing stable distribution releases). It's also seen in various third party apt repositories that ship software to users that break their systems by causing future upgrade issues because they mess with distribution-provided dependencies in a way that future distribution package updates do not know about. apt/deb also provides no application sandboxing for third party software that you might trust less than your distribution. If as a developer you've ever tried to ship software to users as deb/apt, you would know this. Complaints about it are all over the Internet and this has been the consensus for many years.
> Don't shove it down our throats, make it optional at least.
It already is optional. You can remove snapd and pin snapd in apt to a negative score to never have it installed again[3]. Chromium won't be available to you as a distribution-provided deb in Ubuntu 20.04 then, but nor is it in Mint.
[1] https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/linux-mint-20-disables-deb2snap...
[2] https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-for...
[3] http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/focal/en/man5/apt_prefer...
Re: Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu
#10You 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? Canonical isn't suddenly going to give up on this, and I don't even want them to.