by temeritatis on 4/24/20, 8:36 PM with 422 comments
by jaytaylor on 4/24/20, 8:52 PM
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 . . .
by psanford on 4/24/20, 9:08 PM
Snaps break debain's stable release model. They allow upstream to ship updates outside of the normal 6 month ubuntu releases. There are times when you might want this, but it should be opt in not mandatory. I thinking specifically of lxd which is only shipped via snaps.
The snap store's trust model is confusing. Its hard to tell who is making the packages and how they are sandboxed. If I'm going to install a proprietary piece of software I want to know exactly what it can and can't do. Lately I've been using firejail when I need to run things like this.
And now for a minor complaint that also feels most user hostile to me: why do the snap developers think its ok to require a non hidden directory in $HOME? Seriously my home directory is MINE, if you have to store application state there at least have the decency to do it in a hidden directory.
by AlexMax on 4/24/20, 9:29 PM
The latest snap I had to get rid of was Visual Studio Code, because I was trying to work on an open source game with it, and I found out that if I launched the game from inside Visual Studio Code, my game wouldn't play sounds because it couldn't communicate with PulseAudio, and attempting to use ALSA just straight up gave me an error.
On the other hand, I've only had positive experiences with AppImage. Gives you an all-in-one image that you can directly execute if you like, and no sandboxing nonsense.
by Darmody on 4/24/20, 10:33 PM
The snap thing is a pain in the ass. I understand the need for something like snap or flatpak. I had software too new or too old that wouldn't work because some dependencies were not updated or were too new. Snaps can solve that by allowing the developers to provide everything you need (or everything you need that is not on your system). But why would I want a snap calculator or a snap system monitor? On 19.04 it would take a couple seconds to open the calculator...thank god they reverted those apps as normal packages.
Now I feel like I felt on Windows when I had to be extra careful installing software in case somethign weird came in the installer. What kind of package is this? Is it a snap? Can I install the normal package? Is the snap provided by someone trustworthy?
I also had to install Unity. Gnome lacks support for multiple monitors. Some stuff like the dash working only on the main monitor breaks completely my workflow. Almost for every action I want to make I have to change my focus to the main monitor.
by vetinari on 4/24/20, 8:49 PM
/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 /.
by cies on 4/24/20, 9:37 PM
https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-setup#remove-snap
This is needed because an every growing number op packages is "dependant" on it.
Here I show how to install Chromium as a DEB package from Debian (on a buntu):
by troyready on 4/24/20, 10:07 PM
A workound is posted at https://bugs.launchpad.net/snapd/+bug/1776873/comments/29 (simple patch & recompile). May be worth making a PPA for the fixed snapd if we can't get the Canonical dev team to fix the core issue.
by usr1106 on 4/25/20, 4:30 AM
I have been using Xubuntu 20.04 for several weeks and it has worked well. Because that's a high end laptop I have not bothered to uninstall snap yet, although that has been on my mind.
I am surprised that the article writes there are snaps installed by default. Checking in Xubuntu 20.04 that's luckily not the case
$ snap list
No snaps are installed yet. Try 'snap install hello-world'.
$ apt show chromium-browser
Package: chromium-browser
Version: 80.0.3987.163-0ubuntu1
...
Pre-Depends: debconf, snapd
...
Description: Transitional package - chromium-browser -> chromium snap
This is a transitional dummy package. It can safely be removed.
.
chromium-browser is now replaced by the chromium snap.
by djhaskin987 on 4/24/20, 9:01 PM
by benjaminjackman on 4/24/20, 9:18 PM
Because hearing things like `sudo apt install chromium` actually aliases to using snap is disconcerting to say the least if true.
by musicale on 4/24/20, 9:55 PM
What is "performant" supposed to mean here?
Is Flatpak faster than Snap? more compact? simpler? more reliable/secure? easier to use? more efficient in terms of cpu/memory/communication/power/etc.? all of the above?
by lemagedurage on 4/24/20, 9:01 PM
by emersion on 4/24/20, 9:01 PM
by antpls on 4/25/20, 7:32 AM
My only con is that the defaults update all snaps like every day, and I really would like to have better control on that, because I'm always on mobile data.
by schmichael on 4/24/20, 9:26 PM
tl;dr -> HashiCorp's various tools exist as snaps but none are published by HashiCorp. All are out of date. Some have incorrect metadata. Few provide any clue as to who or where the upstream is. There's usually not even a way to contact the snap author to submit patches or ask for an upstream link. eg https://snapcraft.io/nomad
by zimbatm on 4/24/20, 9:57 PM
There is a level of care here which I think is great. Some engineer somewhere made sure that the system would still work without snaps. This is a very Debian attitude which Ubuntu inherits from and which I would like to celebrate for a bit :-)
by smkellat on 4/24/20, 9:39 PM
by lainga on 4/24/20, 8:47 PM
by ThrowawayR2 on 4/24/20, 8:50 PM
by oedmarap on 4/25/20, 2:11 AM
Along with the native package "bundles" (e.g. dev-tools, ruby-basic, containers-virt, etc.) that include built-in dependencies, Flatpak/FlatHub apps seem to work better than Snap/Snapcraft in my experience.
by red_admiral on 4/25/20, 9:32 AM
People like me who would like a system that works their way, even if it's not the same way as the distribution maintainers - nope. Believe it or not, I don't want my desktop to be full of animations, I want updates to happen on my schedule, and I care about having the active title bar a different colour to the rest.
People who believe in Free As In Freedom - it's still technically free, but for all practical purposes it might as well not be if you have to recompile a core package for things like using a non-standard home directory path. This is one of many things where I sigh and go Freedom wasnt meant to be like this.
The average non-techy user - uses windows anyway, and has access to a much larger software ecosystem as a result.
by pmontra on 4/24/20, 9:03 PM
by ilaksh on 4/24/20, 9:58 PM
by KoenDG on 4/25/20, 12:19 AM
Not fun to think that could have happened on a production env if people didn't disable snap.
by simosx on 4/25/20, 1:21 AM
That does not forbid others to package LXD independently. Debian has been close to packaging LXD at https://wiki.debian.org/LXD It is a matter of picking up interest to complete the work.
by ezoe on 4/25/20, 8:09 AM
It's not much of a problem for me since I believe that keeping diversity of Web browser is necessary for the healthy Web ecosystem and I force myself to use Firefox. And I really hate Chromium force me to waste CPU time on some kind of test payload occasionaly, it use 100% of a core and there is no way to disable it.
I'm fine with restricting myself to use Firefox since I'm not a Web frontend developer so I don't need to test Chromium behaviours myself. But others may not.
by fapjacks on 4/24/20, 10:54 PM
by pnako on 4/24/20, 11:17 PM
by stbtrax on 4/24/20, 10:48 PM
by lokedhs on 4/25/20, 3:46 PM
Flatpak exists and works. The application I'm working on is distributed on Flathub, and I don't have the time nor the interest to learn yet another packaging system.
Ubuntu would do well trying to not just lead (which they do in some aspects, I'm sure) but also try to follow when it's more appropriate. The push towards Unity and now Snap just causes more fragmentation in the Linux community.
by SkyMarshal on 4/26/20, 8:51 AM
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man8/update-alter...
by aloknnikhil on 4/25/20, 4:12 AM
by LockAndLol on 4/25/20, 9:03 AM
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/g7cv6k/debs...
The deb tries to install the Chromium snap package ;)
by Tijdreiziger on 4/24/20, 10:32 PM
by usr1106 on 4/25/20, 5:31 AM
Inspired by this post I checked what is actually offered as a snap.
This one surprised me: https://snapcraft.io/aws-kernel
Who can explain me how I would use a kernel running as a snap?
Well, last updated 2017, so I don't think I want to try that one.
by joshuaellinger on 4/25/20, 5:20 AM
Just tried to install 20.04 on LVM. It gets in to a completely broken state if you misconfigure the network due to an error in an exception handler in an Python error handling view in the UI. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
by coderesearch on 4/25/20, 10:15 AM
a) is it possible to use Chromium without snaps?
b) Can anybody please describe the general experience with Centos for a media production machine - needs to run NVIDIA GPU support, Ardour, low latency jackd and Davinci Resolve on XFCE.
by nikisweeting on 4/24/20, 9:11 PM
by favadi on 4/25/20, 5:36 AM
by arodyginc on 4/24/20, 10:15 PM
by dancemethis on 4/25/20, 1:36 PM
by ressetera on 4/24/20, 9:48 PM
I think most users will be fine. Those of us who need more fine grained control, can have it.
by sgnnseven on 4/25/20, 2:55 AM
by notokay on 4/24/20, 9:38 PM
In this month only I had to give up using firefox because uglyBar and ubuntu because of snaps.
There won't be anywhere to run soon.
by Pmop on 4/24/20, 9:35 PM
sudo apt install gnome-software-plugin-flatpakby grizzles on 4/25/20, 2:15 AM
ufw < firewall-config
===============
I like & prefer Ubuntu. But where else is Fedora/CentOS/other distros ahead of Ubuntu?
by bfrog on 4/25/20, 2:40 PM
by zamadatix on 4/25/20, 1:14 AM
by ausjke on 4/25/20, 3:51 AM
by coleifer on 4/24/20, 9:36 PM
I strongly recommend anyone similarly frustrated to check out debian, which is a fantastic distro. Thanks to Kevin for posting this, but if you're using Ubuntu and disabling snap, you're fighting against the current and I have to imagine it's going to be increasingly difficult with subsequent releases.
by aledthemathguy on 4/25/20, 9:15 AM