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.
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.
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.
snap is OK vs compiling stuff.
But it is bullshit that they “snapped” things like Firefox, quick has a repo with .debs
I know why I hate snap, no confusion here.
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.
Correct me if I’m wrong but Ubuntu is the mostly used Linux desktop OS out there so I wouldn’t call it unsuccessful.
Edit : I’m an idiot I can’t read snaps are not successful Ubuntu is
Hm. And you’d give Snaps the credit for that?
that’s not relevant here although It would be even more successful without snaps imo
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 (from a free/libre pov) one down my throat…
(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”
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
no you didn’t, you can install flatpak using the terminal but iirc flatpak are mostly made with GUI applications in mind, while snaps support installing command line utils quite well
Ah, fair enough, probbaly me misremembering then
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.
…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.
“Successful”
why depict RMS this way
They forgot the halo.
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.
Sheer* probably. Unless there a technical merit about cutting stuff.
Thx!
Np. We programmer types gotta help each other keep docs sharp ;)
Also than*
MR accepted. Thx!
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.
Former Unix security chief.
Do not use snaps. Risky as hell.
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.
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.
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
So that’s admittedly not a good look for canonical, but my read of that is that if you’re getting widely-known software from a developer who’s publishing it to snap themselves, and you’re cautious about your usage, snap is fine.
For example, essentially my only use of snap is to install certbot. If I follow the directions from certbot.eff.org precisely, then I’ll get certbot installed and no issues.
I certainly agree that (a) the system is ripe for abuse and (b) should be self-hostable to support Free software. Both of these could be fixed by canonical opening it up.
If you don’t like snaps, don’t use the distribution by the company who tries to establish them.
I agree, have seen so many people trying to document how to “desnap” Ubuntu and wondered why bother, you are figuring against what is now the whole point of Ubuntu whole 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.
And also warn newcomers not to invest time into those distros.
Exactly. I hope pop moves away from ubuntu at some point though.
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)?
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)
“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
So they have somewhere a dpkg hook but still install it if you toggle that option?
It is the same thing. Just that base Ubuntu supposedly doesnt have snap, but
sudo apt install firefoxinstalls snap and then snap firefox.You should add a PPA before installing so it has a source for non-snap Firefox
Either that or stop babysitting canonical and use debian instead
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
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.
