I respect people who don't like snaps, but Canonical will not abandon a successful project
I respect people who don't like snaps, but Canonical will not abandon a successful project
92 comments
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I don't mind Snaps in a vacuum, but the unforgivable thing is that they messed with the package repo so that instead of installing a deb package as I intended, it installs a Snap stub which I did not want. If Canonical hadn't forced them on users in that way, I'd have been fine with them.
Instead, back to Debian I went (sorry I ever left, actually)
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I mean I used to used to use Ubuntu for my server now I use Debian cos fuck snaps.
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Ow! My brain!
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So I didn't realize that the snaps logo is an origami bird.
"It was like a piece of self-opening origami, or a rosebud blooming into a rose in just a few seconds. Where just a few moments earlier there had been a smoothly curved black disk, there was now a bird. A bird, hovering there." - Douglas Adams, describing the Hitchhiker's Guide, Mk. II, from Mostly Harmless.
A bit on the nose there, Canonical.
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Same, I used to always pick Ubuntu to spin up servers. Now I pick it never.
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The other day I tested Ubuntu just to see if it had gotten any better. It has become worse.
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Same, Debian is the way to go (for servers, I can't stand it on desktop)
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successful project
That is a very biased claim. It's like saying that the PS5 is the most successful gaming platform because God Of War: Ragnarök and Ghost Of Tsushima players prefer it over Xbox and PC.
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Did they say it's the most successful project? Because Sony saying that the PS5 is a successful platform because players prefer it over other options doesn't seem biased at all. It's just an objective statement of fact
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If you go to snapcraft.io, you can see snap being installed on many other distributions other than Ubuntu. It will not show you the exact numbers, but people willingly install it on their machines. I think that's successful.
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I don't think "there exists an unknown number of non-Ubuntu machines with snap installed" is a valid metric when the general sentiment seems to be apathy. It's popular for the same reason Internet Explorer was popular -- it's forcibly installed with the default OS.
If the numbers were favorable, Canonical would release them.
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It’s not successful though. Like, maybe if your measure of success is that it’s usable, sure. But no other OSes have adopted it. Not even Ubuntu’s downstream OSes like Mint or Pop_OS!.
Users don’t like it, vendors don’t like it, other OS maintainers don’t like it. I’m not sure why that would be considered successful.
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They also called unity successful at some point
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Unity was a nice DE. Being on KDE since 12 years, I still miss some of its features, e.g. merging the menu items with the title bar.
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Yeah, I was pissed when they went away from it. It was great for small screen devices.
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And yet they abandoned it.
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At least you could use a different desktop if you didn't like it.
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I know why I hate snap, no confusion here.
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If you don't like snaps, don't use the distribution by the company who tries to establish them.
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And also warn newcomers not to invest time into those distros.
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Exactly. I hope pop moves away from ubuntu at some point though.
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I agree, have seen so many people trying to document how to "desnap" Ubuntu and wondered why bother, you are fighting against what is now the whole point of Ubuntu while trying to use Ubuntu while so many other options exist.
I do happily encourage folks to explain why they left Ubuntu behind as I did (snaps). No confusion, just a reiteration of disappointment that they went from being my favorite distro to completely off my list with the snap stuff.
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Nix, guix, flatpak, and OSI images are all better "universal" packages managers on sheer technical merits while also not be a vendor locked proprietary solution.
Snaps are worse than what Redhat is doing.
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"Successful"
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snaps are a proprietary vendor-locked format, the only redeeming quality is being able to run them in cli (once Flatpak get that too, there is no valid reason for snaps to exist).
I just find it midly infuriating (if that even is a thing, meaning I hate it but it's not that significant for me to distro hop on my work laptop) to have two "universal" package formats on my system with Canonical shoving the objectively worse one (from a free/libre pov) down my throat...
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(once Flatpak get that too, there is no valid reason for snaps to exist).
They said they will not fix it due to "security concerns"
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I've used flatpak only once, but I am pretty sure I ran it through the cli. Did I imagine that? i might have imagined that, it was a while ago
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What utter BS. Stop spreading FUD from others. A simple search would find the source code https://github.com/snapcore/
Snaps are open source, including the store.
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...no?
The backend is proprietary and you or other orgs cannot run their own server. It's harcoded to use Canonical's servers for obtaining snaps and their metadata...
seething Ubuntu fans are funny af lol.
Your leash being longer than average doesn't remedy the fact that you're still tied to a pole... -
Can I self host the official snap server, and use it with an unmodified client? If not, it's proprietary.
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Former Unix security chief.
Do not use snaps. Risky as hell.
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Why? I've heard this for years at this point, but as someone who rarely uses snaps because they're the only convenient option for software I'm using, I'm generally ambivalent about them.
People seem to hold really strong opinions about snap but I've never been able to get a straight answer, just a bunch of hand waving.
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Mainly the snap client doesnt let you configure a secondary source, and ubuntu's repo doesn't have a good track record of not providing malware.
https://baronhk.wordpress.com/2023/10/01/malware-in-the-ubuntu-snap-store-again/
https://www.linuxuprising.com/2018/05/malware-found-in-ubuntu-snap-store.html
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My biggest hit was when they pushed browsers to snaps, and I couldn't do some of my school projects because my school stuff was on a separate disk that the snap was not allowed to access. (Had to use o365, and wasn't installing windows to write my papers)
In short, it messed up my workflow.
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The one app I can't stand as a snap is firefox, it took a minute to navigate to the first webpage every time I start up. The rest are or more less fine I think, but flatpak meets my needs for most other applications.
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Also command line tools are terrible as snaps. And the worst part is you have no idea why they won't work. It doesn't tell you that snap is the problem. It just doesn't work.
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It look me about two hours to realize that snap was the problem when I was trying to run Mastodon in a Docker container. That was the last straw before I moved to Fedora.
Snap can’t read anything outside of the
/homedirectory, and there’s no way to fix that except changing the source code and recompiling it.
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I'd be curious to see some statistics on how many Ubuntu users removed snaps vs how many haven't changed the default.
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I’d bet most ubuntu user don’t know the difference between snap and deb, tho.
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I didn't until apps started breaking. The snap version of steam, Firefox, and Unity (I think?) all started to have issues. When I googled around people would often ask "deb or snap"? I uninstalled the snap packages and installed the deb packages and most of my issues went away.
I ultimately switched to Linux Mint because I kept having stability issues and I was just desperate for a solution. But snap was not a great experience for me.
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Exactly, wouldn't most of the people who really care already have moved on from Ubuntu?
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I remove that abomination every chance I get.
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I removed it and it was a pain.
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Upstart and Unity are waiting for you.
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Don’t forget Mir!
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I knew I'd find some receipts in here.
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When Mozilla provide the firefox deb package - Why not give it then? IMO snaps/flatpacks are slower to start, can't be updated while running, takes more diskspace, and takes longer time to update. With the isolation we also have different kind of problems - have you given it the correct permission?, and how do you get keepassxc browser extension to work with it(they dont support it)?
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So, I used ubuntu for pretty close to 20 years and it was my go to distro. I have had hundreds upon hundreds of servers running ubuntu.
Last few years I've been moving away from ubuntu because of their lack of respect for their core users. They have no clear vision and when they do, its a magnificently shitty one like the donkey balls decision to enfrorce snap on everything.
I will still have some ubuntu servers to take care of, but every new server I set up will be fedora.
Because fuck snaps, thats why
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I had like 4 snaps installed in my system and it was hogging like 60Gb of storage. What the actual fuck.
I wish I kept the names of the dependencies, I just ran a command to remove all snaps and the snap itself.
Am I talking bullshit here? I saw my disk drop 60gb after I did that but I have no evidence.
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snap (especially firefox beeing one) made me an arch user
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snap is OK vs compiling stuff.
But it is bullshit that they "snapped" things like Firefox, which has a repo with .debs
Edit: typo
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I hate having several package managers coexisting on my computer, and the only advantage of snap is that it solves a problem I've never encountered in 25 years.
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why depict RMS this way
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They forgot the halo.
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Personally, I use Debian and gravitate towards flat paks, but I'm starting to question whether this is just one of those hills Linux users arbitrarily choose to die on a la systemd/wayland? I suppose one of the advantages of an opinionated OS is a vast array of opinions
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"But the Calamares versions have an install option without Snaps"
Well that also doesnt have a webbrowser and will install snaps the second you want one
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So they have somewhere a dpkg hook but still install it if you toggle that option?
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I hate snaps, but NextCloud snap is way easier to than the other methods, so it gets a pass... Only one
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Over docker compose? You just apply the file and you are good to go.
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You still need to install NextCloud next. Then if you are on a home lab you'll probably need a reverse proxy too
On Ubuntu it's just install > go to config > whitelist all urls
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What’s wrong with being Robert Baratheon
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He downloaded Snaps and ate them.
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That reminds me...
I miss those Robert Baratheon memes from the freefolk sub
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We all miss the sentient bobby_b bot
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He downloaded a snap while drunk...and we know what happens from there ...
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I don't really see a problem with a snaps/flatpaks as long as they are not on application I use every day.
But maybe it is easier if we have one standard instead of two.
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Multiple standards are good, initially. Multiple visions and approaches can get tested. The best hopefully displaced the rest, whilst picking up all the other good ideas.
If there was only one standard we would get stuck with snaps with no alternatives.
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I look at this from the developers perspective. Only need to learn one is good.
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92 comments
It's not that successful if the userbase hates it and would rather use a competitor.
For me it was a successful deterrent. Debian bookworm has been wonderful.
Yeah I love it, Debian feels like opening a featureless gray box that just says "OS" on the front. Add whatever you want. A blank canvas. It's as close to "generic" Linux as you can get.
I installed mint on my second PC, and it's great. I feel like migrating my main, but I'm not sure it would go smoothly. I've had a lot of issues with my four months old Ubuntu install, lately the keyboard is nonfunctional at the login screen about half the time. Snaps are another reason making me want to leave it behind.