from Hacker News

Ubuntu Snap update spoiled my World Cup Final

by tomjuggler on 12/18/22, 6:53 PM with 217 comments

  • by thot_experiment on 12/18/22, 9:14 PM

    Snap is awful, no arguments there. I think the more important thing here is that the very idea that something should update itself is so incredibly insanely broken and I cannot for the life of me understand why it's the norm.

    The number of times I've been hacked and suffered a data loss is astronomically small compared to the number of times I've had something update and suffered a data loss, or more importantly the number of times I've had something update and cause a regression or break something. Then I have to spend my precious time bringing something that was PREVIOUSLY IN A WORKING STATE back to a working state, which is one of the most infuriating feelings.

  • by kybernetyk on 12/18/22, 9:03 PM

    >I am going back to Arch. My computer is my computer, and I don’t care anymore how much work it takes, I’m going to take charge so nothing like this ever happens again.

    From my experience the only real work load with Arch was the set up. Once I installed it and configured everything to my liking there has been nearly 0 work with maintaining the system. I've been running my installation of Arch since 2016 and the system didn't break even once.

  • by neilv on 12/18/22, 8:37 PM

    Snap getting more invasive was the final straw, which led me to move a startup away from Ubuntu LTS, to Debian Stable.

    (Was already leaning towards moving, because a rough monitoring of security updates over several months showed Debian was strangely more trustworthy. Snap making things even worse for some of our systems made the decision easier.)

  • by CSDude on 12/18/22, 7:28 PM

    Snap is an abomination. See my previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33173762

    I fought with a guy in 2015 that believed snap was the future, and this cost me almost my job back then.

  • by voidfunc on 12/18/22, 8:39 PM

    Snap is a pile or garbage and I really wish Ubuntu would just stop trying to be a little different all the time. They learned their lesson with Upstart but I guess it'll be a few releases until the abandon Snap.

  • by hinata08 on 12/18/22, 7:52 PM

    To the defence of Snap, I have the same issues on my Firefox installed with PPA

    (Firefox updates at random time, then kindly asks to reboot by replacing each webpage by a grey one with a restart button, and it doesn't restart tabs in private windows)

    It's a very Firefox problem, not snap

    (I use PPA and not Snap because snap outright doesn't work when your home isn't /home/uname , and mine is /home/company_domain/uname ) (I can't believe that ubuntu forces you to use a software that isn't production ready)

  • by amelius on 12/18/22, 7:37 PM

    Heh, I just tried to fire up a Snap instance of FreeCad on a remote machine (because snap on the local machine was broken). Got an "X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication", even though xeyes started just fine. It seems to be yet another Snap limitation.

    Found this thread from more than 2 years ago:

    https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/x11-connection-rejected-because...

  • by silisili on 12/18/22, 9:12 PM

    At this point I have trouble feeling sympathy. All of us former and some current users have been outlining the problems with snap for years, this one included.

    Just find any HN thread (or probably Reddit and Twitter threads) about ubuntu or snaps from the last few years and you'll see.

    At this point it's akin to starting smoking today then acting shocked when you get lung cancer.

  • by guiambros on 12/18/22, 8:43 PM

    Snap is a disaster, and full of problematic structural decisions that are now really hard to fix (e.g. [1]).

    I've decided to delay my upgrade to 22.04 given Canonical's increasingly aggressive push towards Snap, and now I'm considering moving to Arch or some other distribution.

    [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1575053

  • by dm319 on 12/18/22, 11:16 PM

    I get why snap is needed, but, like others, my experience has been poor. The first issue was Ubuntu 22.04 shipping the firefox snap only. It's ok for small occasional use programs that you need the bleeding edge version on. But it's not ok to wait 30+ seconds for firefox to open.

    They fixed that. But I hit into it's idea of security - being unable to open html files on my local drive, unable to load links from my mutt client, and unable to download and save directly into a specific folder.

    And worse, the snap updates just don't function well. They remind you when you are using the program, and they don't seem to update when you're not using it.

    Real shame, but these are fixable problems.

  • by j1elo on 12/18/22, 7:58 PM

    They went to Arch, which is fine, although quite a steep change in the baseline system. New package manager, new update cadence, new "way to do things".

    Another alternative with much less change would have been Linux Mint: it still is a fine-tuned Ubuntu, but without the Snap Store.

  • by bfrog on 12/18/22, 7:46 PM

    Snap is terrible. Trying to solve the problem the wrong way. See nix/guix for how it’s done right.

  • by Mikeb85 on 12/18/22, 8:10 PM

    Yeah, Snap updates seem cursed for the newest Ubuntu.

    I'm on Fedora these days, can't see ever leaving it the way things are going. It's rock solid and seems to be driving the state of the art in Linux things...

  • by pitched on 12/18/22, 7:23 PM

    Site seems to be having trouble keeping up right now: https://archive.ph/Hnr8P

  • by Darmody on 12/18/22, 9:06 PM

    That's why the first thing you do once Ubuntu is installed is remove snap completely.

    It's sad that now we have to fight against the OS like on Windows.

  • by tomjuggler on 12/19/22, 4:37 AM

    Update: so as mentioned in my blog post, my panic force reboot during the Firefox Snap update has definitely done something bad to my system. It's now failing to boot most of the time and also crashing randomly when it does boot. Not sure what the root cause is but it's a 1 year old laptop.

    And yes I will definitely be re-watching the game after I have finished installing Arch.

    I also signed up to Cloudflare due to you all hammering my server last night!

  • by baggy_trough on 12/18/22, 7:22 PM

    Snaps are certainly a cursed technology. I've had one update in production and break things outside of our regular release process.

  • by chrsw on 12/19/22, 12:43 AM

    I found Snap to be frustating. It's trying to address a real problem but imho it fails to make life easier. As soon as something breaks or goes wrong and I have to look under the hood, my mental model of how traditional Unix software managment "works" is almost useless.

    Why can't something be coherent and powerful behind the scenes but slick up front for users who don't want to think too much about the complexities of software managment?

  • by torginus on 12/19/22, 8:50 AM

    Yet another example of why the traditional champion companies of the Linux desktop (Canonical, Red Hat etc.) are like a poisoned apple - they are catering to their paying userbase (who are running servers, IoT, PoS, whatever), and don't give a damn about making technical changes that break the average users' experience.

    In short they are doing the exact same as Microsoft does with Windows, but the enemy this time is inside the gates.

  • by throwaway67743 on 12/20/22, 3:55 AM

    This is not the fault of snap though, Firefox is just fucking useless - the current instance of the browser that's already loaded everything it has into ram since it will happily suck up a gig while doing nothing should not break because the on disk version has changed.

    But no, instead of continuing it will do one of several things:

      - show a blank page after entering URL or search term (no feedback, it just does nothing)
 - fail to refresh the tab
 - crash entirely
 - helpfully suggest you restart Firefox in one of those tabs that stopped working earlier.
    It is embarrassingly bad, just like the overall UX for Mozilla products is unfortunately, but alas the only other choice is brave and its even worse somehow. (Chrome proper would also be fine but Firefox is the only multi platform* browser that supports custom sync etc)

    * Firefox is horrific on android too - broken rendering, blank pages until you engage the address bar and hit go again, etc, add-ons basically unavailable...

  • by anonymousiam on 12/19/22, 3:27 AM

    Snap has its uses, but Firefox is most certainly not one of them. Firefox maintains personalized databases that aren't where they should be under Snap. Also, Snap completely ruins the ability to run Firefox remotely on a local X display. I was fine with Snap being part of Ubuntu, but when they migrated Firefox to Snap, I uninstalled Snap and manually installed Firefox directly from Mozilla.

  • by happyjack on 12/19/22, 2:57 AM

    Snap is one of the few reasons that made me ditch Ubuntu forever.

    I don't know a ton about Canonical's business model, but was the idea to get everyone hooked on snap and then force a subscription out of it?

    Snap is the antithesis of apt or dnf in regards to what I want out of a package manager.

  • by DuckFeathers on 12/18/22, 7:46 PM

    I always disable auto-updates on my PCs. The OS has no business installing anything on it's schedule, or in any schedule. I do it on mine as I go. I just have update notifications and I install them manually when I feel like it.

    Also, it is bizarre that they desinged a software delivery system with no option to disable auto-updates... and only adding the option now.

    And the fact that Firefox frooze during the update is also strange. Not sure if it's a snap problem or Firefox problem.

    As a long-time Firefox and Linux user (started using Firefox when it was alpha version and Linux around 2002), the best decision I made around 3 years ago was move to Windows and Edge.

  • by rubyist5eva on 12/18/22, 11:37 PM

    Page isn't working for me but what happened? I use over a bunch snaps on my Ubuntu install (1password, firefox, docker, telegram, discord just off the top of my head) and updates don't happen until I restart the app, and it gives me a desktop notification something like a week out before it forces it, never had an issue with it personally. I can't think of any desktop app that I use that stays open for more than a week at a time that is a huge distruption to close it and reopen it.

  • by orbit7 on 12/18/22, 10:51 PM

    Automated update processes that run at the expense of securing access to information when it's needed or that do so with the risk of data loss are a complete failure in my view.

  • by renewiltord on 12/18/22, 7:39 PM

    Crazy game for sure. The best WC ever (or over the last 20 anyway). This is a classic UX problem with automation: there are times when you don't know the operating condition. It's better to prompt with opt-out.

    Mac OS prompts, and that's better than anything else.

    Snaps are also abysmally slow. And while I'm complaining, they also occupy my `mount` output so that's annoying.

  • by alkonaut on 12/18/22, 8:20 PM

    Can someone explain what’s going on here? Is there a design mistake here? Does the app update in-place rather than side by side so it simply launches the updated version on next launch?

    If it’s side by side then why does it even affect the old version it force a restart? And if it’s not side by side then who the hell designed it?

  • by Am4TIfIsER0ppos on 12/19/22, 11:34 AM

    Autoupdate is always an abomination regardless of the software doing it. Snap, apt, steam, firefox itself.

  • by amadeuspagel on 12/21/22, 1:50 PM

    I got strange notifications telling me to close VS Code, so that it can be updated. But it's often closed, and I kept getting these notifications. I ended up uninstalling the snap and installing VS Code from the website.

  • by bobmaxup on 12/18/22, 9:59 PM

    You can set when snap refreshes take place:

    https://snapcraft.io/docs/keeping-snaps-up-to-date#:~:text=o...

  • by darthrupert on 12/19/22, 5:17 AM

    You shouldn't be watching that pile of regressive corruption anyway so no harm done.

  • by alanhaha on 12/19/22, 5:54 AM

    Well, I like this line in my Ubuntu customization: sudo apt remove --purge snapd

  • by simonebrunozzi on 12/18/22, 9:25 PM

    Sorry to hear this. If you managed not to get "spoilered" on the result, try to watch it (I'm sure there's several ways to watch a rerun)... it was a phenomenal game.

  • by mablopoule on 12/19/22, 10:28 AM

    Honestly, I love snap because it's the main reason why I've switched to Arch after a decade of Ubuntu, and I couldn't be happier about it.

  • by bradwood on 12/18/22, 11:30 PM

    TIL all about showmax.com - As a ZA expat living in the UK, I'm all over this. Looks like some good content from ZA, Nigeria, et al!

  • by aborsy on 12/18/22, 9:15 PM

    I have a snap installation of nextcloud. It has self updated for years with no problem. The set up took almost no time. Canonical tests the package before releasing it in their OS.

    Compared to bare metal and docker installation that were broken every few months and required maintenance, I have been pretty happy with snap.

    Based on this, would say snap is not a bad idea. Sure snaps might be slow, but that’s improving.

    I don’t have time to tweak applications. Let canonical package and test all dependencies for their platform, secure and update the apps.

  • by major505 on 12/19/22, 7:04 PM

    The main reason I still use ubuntu based bistros is Pop OS. The rest, I prefer fedora this days.

  • by Broker0 on 12/18/22, 8:43 PM

    I like the conclusion. Factor 'X' messed up my 'Y', going back to previous solution.

  • by mesebrec on 12/18/22, 7:30 PM

    Snaps don't update when the app is running. I don't know what happened here, but it seems the problem might be somewhere else.