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Ubuntu does stand for a certain set of values; security built in and doing The Right Thing on the behalf of the end user are part of it. That does lead to certa

Ubuntu does stand for a certain set of values; security built in and doing The Right Thing on the behalf of the end user are part of it. That does lead to certain distro semantics that I'm sure not everyone will like. And that's OK, we do appreciate that some people want to control more deeply what happens in the distro. There is a whole other set of users that would prefer that Ubuntu kept out of their way administrative actions for which they trust the machine to handle. They are probably more silent because they are mostly OK with how things work. And I'll say that I'm not comfortable with everything about snaps so it's more of a spectrum than binary acceptance. Snaps were invented because we had a problem. We wanted to make it easier for software publishers -- think games, desktop tools, browsers -- to deliver their software to Ubuntu users, but debs were both too hard and too powerful to make that a viable proposition. In the old days, people relied on archive.canonical.com [1] from which debs like skype were published, but it was unsustainable and led to poorly packaged and out of date software. Regarding third parties, in the end, nobody in the community reads through the source code of every patch applied to binaries in their systems. There is a degree of assumed trust in any update. I accept that trusting Canonical is one thing and trusting third party publishers is another, but given the motivation I describe in the previous paragraph, the decision to use snaps wasn't made in a vaccuum. [1] Which still exists, if you want to go and check out the pool for third-party binaries. All of those installed as root!

pdonis 6y ago
> We wanted to make it easier for software publishers -- think games, desktop tools, browsers -- to deliver their software to Ubuntu users, but debs were both too hard and too powerful to make that a viable proposition. Is there somewhere--a blog post on Canonical's website, perhaps--that explains this in more detail? Off the top of my head I'm having a hard time seeing how snaps improve the situation, unless it's simply the "dependency hell" problem. > nobody in the community reads through the source code of every patch applied to binaries in their systems That's true, but irrelevant to the concerns of users like me. We aren't saying we insist on controlling when all updates are applied to our systems because we want to ensure that we have time to read the source code. We're just saying we insist on controlling when all updates are applied to our systems, period. > There is a degree of assumed trust in any update. Trusting that, for example, a particular update doesn't include malware is one thing. Trusting a third party to control when an update is applied to my system is something quite different. It seems to me that you are trying to conflate the two, which might be fine for some set of users (and, again, if that's simply the only set of users you are targeting, that's your call), but is not fine for me, nor I suspect for other users with similar concerns to mine. > All of those installed as root! Doesn't any update get installed as root? I certainly don't want system-level binaries installed to my user account; that would be a huge breach of security since my user would then have write access to them.

pdonis 6y ago

> We wanted to make it easier for software publishers -- think games, desktop tools, browsers -- to deliver their software to Ubuntu users, but debs were both too hard and too powerful to make that a viable proposition. Is there somewhere--a blog post on Canonical's website, perhaps--that explains this in more detail? Off the top of my head I'm having a hard time seeing how snaps improve the situation, unless it's simply the "dependency hell" problem. > nobody in the community reads through the source code of every patch applied to binaries in their systems That's true, but irrelevant to the concerns of users like me. We aren't saying we insist on controlling when all updates are applied to our systems because we want to ensure that we have time to read the source code. We're just saying we insist on controlling when all updates are applied to our systems, period. > There is a degree of assumed trust in any update. Trusting that, for example, a particular update doesn't include malware is one thing. Trusting a third party to control when an update is applied to my system is something quite different. It seems to me that you are trying to conflate the two, which might be fine for some set of users (and, again, if that's simply the only set of users you are targeting, that's your call), but is not fine for me, nor I suspect for other users with similar concerns to mine. > All of those installed as root! Doesn't any update get installed as root? I certainly don't want system-level binaries installed to my user account; that would be a huge breach of security since my user would then have write access to them.