46 ms·

It's still work in progress but snaps genuinely make packaging easier. There are rough edges, especially on the desktop, but those are all being worked on, in c

by zyga 6y ago

It's still work in progress but snaps genuinely make packaging easier. There are rough edges, especially on the desktop, but those are all being worked on, in collaboration with flatpak actually. It will take a while but in the future it will not be any worse at runtime and it will be much, much easier to package and run apps across releases and OSes

cies 6y ago
Ubuntu had the calculator as a snap! What's the idea with that? It suddenly took 2 secs to load and uses load of memory... I dont care packaging got easier. I care for a smooth working system I can understand and instrument, and that does not hog resources.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  Snap and flatpak are great fallback methods. I first try installing software natively, but sometimes it's not available/compatible and you really need it to work, so flatpak is great to just get it running at all. I'm not a fan of using it as the default though, and flatpak isn't immune to issues either, for example I use a flatpak package which regularly can't be updated for months because of some incorrect metadata if the error message can be believed. I still think it's a good step forward for increasing compatibility especially across different Linux distributions.
  - cies 6y ago
    They may be fallback methods, but snap is for sure not "great" (not a finished product as other have pointed out). As you also understood, snap is sadly not promoted as a fallback method. This stuff is pushed with corporate power. Not adopted because great great fallback method it provides. The compatibility is also balkanized for the start with the flatpack/snap split. Pfff, what a mess.
- readwind 6y ago
  And some times, on some systems, the calculator got all transparent, and unusable, so, I left Ubuntu after that. Granted I was on LTS'es almost all of the time, so, this might be highly circumstantial and subjective. But I've been there as you apparently also have. I hope snap improves for the best of all, it seems amateurish to push snap-apps, at their then-current state, in LTS releases. I left basically after Ubuntu 14.04, and even that, 14.04, was a let-down from 12.04, and so on. In my experiences.
- julianlam 6y ago
  Oh! Is _that_ why the calculator is nigh unusable now? Sheesh, this just shot snap's credibility right out the window. It's faster for me to boot up the node executable and do my calculations there.
  - lozf 6y ago
    `bc -l` is pretty awesome.
  - kingosticks 6y ago
    Yes! But you can "fix" it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21650743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21650743
  - slavik81 6y ago
    The minimal fix for the sluggish calculator on Ubuntu 18.04 to 19.10: sudo snap remove gnome-calculator sudo apt install gnome-calculator The more complete solution is entirely removing snap. I did that long ago, but my process was a little painful. From my logs, it went something like this: snap list snap remove <copy-paste packages from above> sudo service snapd restart # core is tricky to get rid of sudo snap remove core snap list # check it's empty sudo apt install gnome-calculator gnome-characters gnome-logs gnome-system-monitor sudo apt purge snapd squashfs-tools gnome-software-plugin-snap rm -r ~/snap See also: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2409173&p=13826670#post13826670 https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2409173&p=13826670...
- GordonS 6y ago
  Do you know why, technically, being packaged as a snap would increase start time and memory usage?
shasheene 6y ago
Also not yet possible to install a snap using a chroot yet : https://bugs.launchpad.net/snappy/+bug/1609903 https://bugs.launchpad.net/snappy/+bug/1609903 (the bug has been open for 3 years). Chroots are a key mechanism to building any customized Linux image. I hope they smooth these rough edges further before they push more snaps onto the world.

by zyga 6y ago

cies 6y ago

Ubuntu had the calculator as a snap! What's the idea with that? It suddenly took 2 secs to load and uses load of memory... I dont care packaging got easier. I care for a smooth working system I can understand and instrument, and that does not hog resources.

alpaca128 6y ago
Snap and flatpak are great fallback methods. I first try installing software natively, but sometimes it's not available/compatible and you really need it to work, so flatpak is great to just get it running at all. I'm not a fan of using it as the default though, and flatpak isn't immune to issues either, for example I use a flatpak package which regularly can't be updated for months because of some incorrect metadata if the error message can be believed. I still think it's a good step forward for increasing compatibility especially across different Linux distributions.
- cies 6y ago
  They may be fallback methods, but snap is for sure not "great" (not a finished product as other have pointed out). As you also understood, snap is sadly not promoted as a fallback method. This stuff is pushed with corporate power. Not adopted because great great fallback method it provides. The compatibility is also balkanized for the start with the flatpack/snap split. Pfff, what a mess.
readwind 6y ago
And some times, on some systems, the calculator got all transparent, and unusable, so, I left Ubuntu after that. Granted I was on LTS'es almost all of the time, so, this might be highly circumstantial and subjective. But I've been there as you apparently also have. I hope snap improves for the best of all, it seems amateurish to push snap-apps, at their then-current state, in LTS releases. I left basically after Ubuntu 14.04, and even that, 14.04, was a let-down from 12.04, and so on. In my experiences.
julianlam 6y ago
Oh! Is _that_ why the calculator is nigh unusable now? Sheesh, this just shot snap's credibility right out the window. It's faster for me to boot up the node executable and do my calculations there.
- lozf 6y ago
  `bc -l` is pretty awesome.
- kingosticks 6y ago
  Yes! But you can "fix" it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21650743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21650743
- slavik81 6y ago
  The minimal fix for the sluggish calculator on Ubuntu 18.04 to 19.10: sudo snap remove gnome-calculator sudo apt install gnome-calculator The more complete solution is entirely removing snap. I did that long ago, but my process was a little painful. From my logs, it went something like this: snap list snap remove <copy-paste packages from above> sudo service snapd restart # core is tricky to get rid of sudo snap remove core snap list # check it's empty sudo apt install gnome-calculator gnome-characters gnome-logs gnome-system-monitor sudo apt purge snapd squashfs-tools gnome-software-plugin-snap rm -r ~/snap See also: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2409173&p=13826670#post13826670 https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2409173&p=13826670...
GordonS 6y ago
Do you know why, technically, being packaged as a snap would increase start time and memory usage?

shasheene 6y ago

Also not yet possible to install a snap using a chroot yet : https://bugs.launchpad.net/snappy/+bug/1609903 https://bugs.launchpad.net/snappy/+bug/1609903 (the bug has been open for 3 years). Chroots are a key mechanism to building any customized Linux image. I hope they smooth these rough edges further before they push more snaps onto the world.