13 ms·

> Auto-updating of snaps can only be deferred at best, until at some point, like Windows, it auto-updates anyway. Even on metered connections, snaps auto-update

• koolba 6y ago
  It’s beyond obnoxious. It’s your computer and there’s no way to disable it from mutating without file system hacks?
  • kazinator 6y ago
    It's not your computer when Canonical is chummy with Microsoft.
  • noncoml 6y ago
    There is. Don’t install Ubuntu. Use Debian.
    • ip26 6y ago
      The above might come across as flip, but I think it's actually spot on. Why would a mission critical or metered-connection-only machine be running the latest Ubuntu desktop anyway? Match the tool to the job.
      • indigodaddy 6y ago
        It usually wouldn’t even be running Debian. More likely CentOS/RHEL/Suse or a Solaris.
        • noncoml 6y ago
          That's the beauty of Linux Distros. We are spoiled for choice.
        • SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
          Or even, gasp, *BSD.
    • ashtonkem 6y ago
      Ubuntu has a real problem here; Desktop Linux users are much more mobile than other OS users. If you’ve installed Ubuntu, you’re fully capable of installing at least Debian, and probably any other Linux distro.
    • curt15 6y ago
      Google rebased their in-house workstation OS from Ubuntu to Debian a few years ago. https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-moves-to-debian-for-in-house-linux-desktop/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-moves-to-debian-for-in-... I wonder if snaps a contributing factor.
  • paride5745 6y ago
    You can cleanup Ubuntu from snaps: https://www.kevin-custer.com/blog/disabling-snaps-in-ubuntu-20-04/ https://www.kevin-custer.com/blog/disabling-snaps-in-ubuntu-... However, Canonical pushes snaps via deb packages (e.g. Chromium). The best option is the use an Ubuntu-based distro, like PopOS or Linux Mint or Elementary OS.
    • KozmoNau7 6y ago
      Or KDE Neon, which is by far the best distro I've used in 20 years of messing around with Linux. I wish they would have based it directly on Debian instead of Ubuntu, but I just stay away from Snaps and get on with my life.
• ssivark 6y ago
  I don’t understand this overbearing obsession for computing companies to direct their users into certain corners. Why?
  • stOneskull 6y ago
    Ubuntu gets its money with Support. Maybe a corner is easier to support. That's my less cynical idea.
• bitcharmer 6y ago
  I've been a very faithful Ubuntu user for 12 years now but if there's no easy way to disable this abomination then my current one (18.04) will be the last. Whose idea was it to replicate one of the worst features of Windows?
  • qznc 6y ago
    18.04 is supported for three more years. Maybe that will be my Ubuntu countdown.
    • scrappyjoe 6y ago
      18.04 has a ten year extended security maintenance life AFAIK, so you could stretch to 2028.
      • eitland 6y ago
        Wow, that's seriously impressive if true. As many others I haven't liked vanilla Ubuntu since they swapped Gnome 2 for a (what I think is a) clone of the Mac OS interface, but my desktop still uses the Ubuntu 18.04 base system under the hood so this might come in handy for a number of people like me.
      • danieldk 6y ago
        Ubuntu security updates do not cover the universe repository, which contains the largest number of packages. The universe repo is 'community-supported', which means that a lot of CVEs are not fixed in practice. https://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-security/cve/universe.html https://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-security/cve/universe.h... So, Ubuntu's LTS support is only relevant security-wise if you mostly stick to the main repository.
        • oarsinsync 6y ago
          Anyone have any idea what Debian's LTS security posture looks like? Is it also restricted to 'main' and does it also ignore 'contrib' and 'non-free'?
• pengaru 6y ago
  With that Ubuntu has become useless trash joining the ranks of Android and its impossible to disable constant Play Store updates funneling endless unknown changes onto a machine you supposedly own.
  • cerberusss 6y ago
    Please check the HN guidelines about "shallow dismissal".
  • bspammer 6y ago
    I've had no problem disabling automatic Play Store updates on my phone. It's in the top level of the settings.
    • pengaru 6y ago
      I'm talking about the play store updating itself. It's proven impossible to entirely disable over here, and when I used adb to forcibly uninstall the play store the device stopped booting a week later requiring a factory reset.
  • yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    What? The play store lets you disable auto-updates, at least per-app.
    • pengaru 6y ago
      Try absolutely blocking the play store from updating itself. Even when I've jumped through all the hoops to supposedly stop this from happening, it will still randomly do an update in my experience.
• ajross 6y ago
  To be fair, Snappy isn't aimed at "mission critical systems", nor even at bandwidth constrained users. It's a straightforward, reasonably robust and obviously used mechanism for pushing routine consumer software. In that realm, the aggregate benefit to society of having everyone running current software outweighs the annoyance of the specialists, sorry. It's always been this way. If you are running "mission critical" software, you need to be using a packaging mechanism (c.f. Docker) which lives at a lower level and provides harder guarantees about what you're running. Those solutions exist, they just aren't Snappy.
  • stryan 6y ago
    Ubuntu is sending out "Mission critical" software as snaps: I think the biggest offender has been LXD, but I'm sure there's others. That combined with Ubuntu forcing snaps as the main packaging method (i.e. you have to jump through various hoops to install .debs of snaps) is what a lot of the outrage about. (Side note: Something about listing Docker as a packaging mechanism makes me uncomfortable. IMO Docker and containers in general are deployment tools, not packaging systems)
    • mrweasel 6y ago
      LXD is a weird one, it doesn't seem that suitable for distribution as a snap in the first place. The filesystem become a magical bundle of weirdness when you use the snap version. Also LXD is something I’m not that happy to have auto updating, I would like to roll it out to a test, preprod or staging environment first. To me snaps seems like a desktop solution that Ubuntu forgot to disable on the server edition.
    • ajross 6y ago
      > IMO Docker and containers in general are deployment tools, not packaging systems Obviously it sits at the boundary, but a "Dockerfile" is (at least when properly used) a recipe for reliably reproducing a specific version of software packaged in a format that can be deployed to all sorts of systems with absolutely minimal dependence on host configuration. That's what people who want a "mission critical Snap" almost certainly want.
  • 6y ago
• daenz 6y ago
  I guess it's finally time to switch to Arch. This is an absolute deal breaker for me as well, as I use an ubuntu system for live visual performances, and I need to ensure that no unexpected auto-updates take place.
  • searchableguy 6y ago
    Try pop os. It doesn't come with snap despite being based on ubuntu 20. They use flatpak in their store.
    • GekkePrutser 6y ago
      Personally I don't want FlatPak either except maybe for 1 or 2 apps where the sandboxing actually makes sense. It's still a waste of resources just to appease lazy maintainers. Ubuntu went totally overboard with their snaps, putting everything in it trying to force it to become a standard. But FlatPak is not great either even though it is an open standard. It's nice for the 1 or 2 niche apps that aren't available any other way, but for the most part I prefer normal packages.
  • modzu 6y ago
    if you like Ubuntu and stability go debian. edit: the downvotes are fascinating. if you do LIVE performances and even remotely care about stability Arch is the last distro you should use. its a great distro but its bleeding edge by design. part of the fun of arch. contrarian views should be expressed with words if possible because id like to know what universe some of you are from..
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • daenz 6y ago
      I didn't downvote you, but the appeal of Arch to me is the extreme customization. Sometimes I need to do really funky setups. That said, the stability of debian is also very appealing for the very reasons you stated.
• harrygeez 6y ago
  This is a hard problem. And Microsoft didn't have a choice. Given an option regular users will never update their computers, perhaps partly due to fear of what they don't understand, fear of change, or maybe due to past bad update experiences. I witness this in my mom with technology all the time. Every time there's a popup she mini-panics, and she has trained herself to click close every time she sees something she doesn't understand. Google started the trend of silently updating Chrome and everyone including Microsoft followed after, except upgrading an OS is nothing like updating a browser. For most parts, I think auto update is necessary for tech illiterates, especially now that everybody's jumping on the Agile bandwagon, including Windows. There needs to be a way to ensure new versions reach their users given everyone's just churning out barely working software these days. Honestly I don't have a problem with that. But if they don't give power user the option to opt out, this is just disrespectful
  • searchableguy 6y ago
    Are linux users regular users?
    • apexalpha 6y ago
      What if your goal is to bring Linux to the masses?
      • searchableguy 6y ago
        That boat sailed long ago. Windows has a pretty decent linux subsystem now. Even devs that were hardcore linux enthusiasts moved to windows. The benefit of linux is that it doesn't force stuff on you that you can't disable compared to windows. If you take that away, there are very little reasons for any normal user to move.
        • alrs 6y ago
          ehhhh, I've never seen a hardcore Linux developer move to Windows. WSL exists to sunset Windows-based development, not the other way around. Windows Server gets to exist so long as it acts as a funnel into Azure. Someday it will be sold off to Wipro, a la VMS or OS/2.
• nikanj 6y ago
  I might defend this if the updates were something like a remote wormable hole, but the updates are more likely to be improvements to drawing avatar icons in Dark Mode or something similarly trivial.
  • derefr 6y ago
    How would you indicate to a package manager that something is a critical bugfix release, rather than a non-critical feature release? Package managers (including snapd) basically just "think" in semver. Semver is one-dimensional: releases are arranged on a big line, and they'll know to auto-update based on e.g. whether a given release is close to your current release on the line. For the cases where we do distinct security updates (e.g. kernel updates), we seem to do them using all sorts of hacks. Maybe we just need a superset of semver, that can encode more than just the "newness" dimension, but also the "criticality" dimension?
    • nikanj 6y ago
      I use a commercial OS, so there's a company out there where some well-paid professional decides which updates need to be pushed out ASAP and which ones can wait until next patch Tuesday. I'm not sure if that person / team can ever be replaced by modifications to a version numbering scheme.
    • rrix2 6y ago
      > Package managers (including snapd) basically just "think" in semver. Semver is one-dimensional: releases are arranged on a big line, and they'll know to auto-update based on e.g. whether a given release is close to your current release on the line. This is NOT how semver works, though... each section has, well, semantic meaning. Some updaters might linearize, sure, and many developers run fast and loose with versioning, but semver is a graph of varying major, minor, and patch version numbers which change with their own semantics which can describe more than just newness Bump major -> y'all best be careful Bump minor -> something you care about maybe changed, read the changelog Bump patch -> we'll probably just fix some bugs patch releases could and should be backportable to other minor releases under the same major release if people care about stability of a module. I think that the "work from master" mentality that npm and GitHub UX has lead people to is one of a handful of reasons that prople misunderstand versioning strings... I agree that flagging criticality is useful, though. Linux packagers like YUM/DNF have had this for a while, even the ability to feed a CVE identifier or bug id in to the package manager to resolve them
• Stierlitz 6y ago
  > .. and it is hardly unreasonable to accommodate them. I think he meant you can't totally disable snap auto-updating.
• ressetera 6y ago
  I'm using opensnitch[1] and it can block snap requests. Pretty nifty software, but it brings my machine to its knees unless I ``` sudo service opensnitchd restart ``` once in a while. [1] https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch
• OrgNet 6y ago
  If you want to disable updates, it should not still be updating... I don't get your point....