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Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it

• jacquesm 6y ago
  Snap sucks. The way open source is straying further and further from its principles is highly annoying. The whole idea that you'd need a container like environment to install an application on a Unix system is very far from where we should be. What's the point of dynamic linking if we then end up shipping half an OS with an application just to get around dependency hell? Might as well ship a pre-linked binary that just does system calls. And it's yet another way to do an end run around repositories, instead you will sooner or later get an app-store like environment that can be controlled by some entity. These large companies should stop fucking around with Linux, it was fine the way it was. Just fix the bugs and leave the rest to the application developers.
  • xwdv 6y ago
    The principles are just that, principles. In practice though, they don’t matter for a vast majority of users, and package managers are far less hassle. Maybe it’s time for the principles to change?
    • foobarbecue 6y ago
      Could you clarify "package managers are far less hassle"? Did that statement have something to do with snap? Less hassle than what?
  • tpmx 6y ago
    > These large companies should stop fucking around with Linux Canonical has 443 employees according to the wikipedia page. Is that large in this context? I don't really think so. Redhat (13k employees) is large. Canonical isn't large.
    • fartcannon 6y ago
      Large in their mind share, not necessarily by employees.
  • viraptor 6y ago
    > What's the point of dynamic linking if we then end up shipping half an OS with an application just to get around dependency hell? Not sure if you were commenting on the whole approach or just snap, but FTR, flatpak uses shared base layers which can be updated individually, so there's still an upside to dynamic linking.
  • 3np 6y ago
    I disagree on the containerization part. It can absolutely improve security a lot by facilitating isolation of namespaces and filesystems. But perhaps base container images on scratch, not on ubuntu:latest ;)
  • zorked 6y ago
    Isn't the sandboxing a good idea though? It feels that Linux got caught in the past and is actually one of the least secure OSes out there, and what keeps it safe is just its small desktop market share. Disclaimer: I never used snap and don't use Ubuntu.
    • 1_player 6y ago
      Flatpak gives you a sandbox, and has basically skirted around any shortcoming of Snap (faster, open, extensible, adopted by every other distro, doesn't pollute /proc/mounts)
      • leetrout 6y ago
        None of the flat pack apps I’ve used on Pop_OS work correctly / as stable as installing a deb directly. I’ve not been impressed at all.
        • 1_player 6y ago
          YMMV. Firefox is the golden standard, at least on Arch Linux. Never have I noticed it was running on a sandbox. I run Discord, Spotify, Thunderbird from Flatpak without any issue either. Visual Studio Code is a regular package, just because its use case it not really suited for a sandbox (access to system binaries, libraries, etc.), but I honestly haven't even tested its Flatpak version.
          • Iolaum 6y ago
            VSCodium flatpak works fine for me. The caveat is that I use the operating system's terminal instead of the one from VSCodium (for things like make test, python environments, etc). VSCodium's terminal operates on a sandboxed environment and I haven't bothered to figure out how it relates to the OS environment that I get from the terminal app.
            • viraptor 6y ago
  • zelphirkalt 6y ago
    One problem is, that those open source principles have not been codified somewhere. With free software we have its licenses guarding the principles. Like copyleft and the requirement to share modifications if distributing software etc. With many open source licenses we have almost nothing in the way of protecting the principles, because licenses like MIT basically say "I do not care.". Open source will be exploited, until people learn, that they have to protect it.
    • Galanwe 6y ago
      > With many open source licenses we have almost nothing in the way of protecting the principles, because licenses like MIT basically say "I do not care.". What's wrong with that? It's perfectly okay to say "I don't care". I do release all my code under MIT because I care about attribution. I don't mind if people want to use it in commercial or closed source applications, nor if they want to modify it somehow. I distribute code because that makes _me_ happy, not because I want to share an ideological statement about how others should distribute their code (or not).
      • zelphirkalt 6y ago
        It is not unethical to do what you do. I would say, that perhaps it is only a little short sighted. I don't mean this in a negative insulting way and I will explain why I think so. The problem is rather, what it means in the long run. The point is, that this kind of only caring about for example attribution makes the ecosystem exploitable. It does not uphold ideals or enforce principles. Without upholding ideals and enforcing principles, how do we expect our principles to be followed in the future? If there is no legal obligation to do anything, which capitalistic (We need to maximize our profit! Ethical principles? Nah, come on ...) big company is willing to go the extra mile to respect the principles of some open source community, perhaps even at the expense of making more profit from a closed source solution? And I mean going the extra mile, without seeing it as an opportunity to use the very action as another means of promoting oneself. Simply going the extra mile, because it is the fair thing to do. As I see it, as long as there is a chance to deviate from following the principles (no copyleft), someone somewhere will do so. Heck, even with such obligation to adhere to principles some people will deviate from the path. The tendency is always towards the wrong direction, if we do not enforce our principles of openness and such. It is an uphill battle. The whole ecosystem goes towards a not so open direction, by these initially small "missteps". Especially when a a big company with a lot of developers takes stuff and makes proprietary stuff out of it, as its product, which usually initially has more functionality than its open source counterpart, users will quickly switch to the non-open proprietary version. They do so because they want that new shiny functionality immediately. The slightest inconvenience is sufficient for many users to drive them towards proprietary software. They do not know nor often do they care initially about using a non-open, non-free thing. Until they are sufficient users to create a bubble, in which the open source ideas are no longer existent. Then however, the network effects are already strong. "But all my friends use X. No on uses Y. I cannot convince them all to switch from X to Y!" Example: There are loaaads of at least open source (and some also free software) messengers out there. All people need to do is to use them. But the network effect and features like integration with (a)social media are so convenient for them, that they give up on their freedoms and use things like Whatsapp or Facebook.
  • hendry 6y ago
    Dynamic linking certainly doesn't work for Steam et al.
  • AsyncAwait 6y ago
    > The way open source is straying further and further from its principles is highly annoying. I do think that's why the distinction between "free software" (copyleft) and merely "open-source" matters. If you look historically, "open-source" became a thing as a reaction to free software where it preserves the most visible benefits, (source code in the open, modifyable by others), but treats these as purely a convenient workflow when working on code, whereas free software is more of a philosophy and so less likely to erode on principles.
    • Delk 6y ago
      I agree that something based strongly on principle rather than convenience is less likely to drift from them, for better and for worse. Free software doesn't need to be copyleft, though. The MIT license, for example, is a free software license, even though it's not copyleft. Projects such as the various flavours of BSD can have pretty strong principles regarding their software distributions remaining free even though they don't prefer copyleft.
      • AsyncAwait 6y ago
        > flavours of BSD can have pretty strong principles regarding their software distributions remaining free even though they don't prefer copyleft That is true, however speaking to many members of the FreeBSD community in particular, there seems to be a strong sentiment of this simply being a practical model of development, rather than a strong ideological stance. In fact a large portion seems to be rocking Macs, "cause it's BSD anyway", which to me does not seem particularly principled. In fact they seem to take pride in completely closed systems being based on FreeBSD, like the PS4, Nintendo Switch etc.
  • rlpb 6y ago
    > The whole idea that you'd need a container like environment to install an application on a Unix system is very far from where we should be. What's the point of dynamic linking if we then end up shipping half an OS with an application just to get around dependency hell? Might as well ship a pre-linked binary that just does system calls. There are two models. The first model is the traditional distribution model. The distribution curates and integrates software, picking (generally) one version of everything and releasing it all together. Users do not get featureful software updates except when they upgrade to a new distribution release - all at once. The downside of this model is that developers who want to ship their new software or feature updates without waiting for a new distribution release get stuck into dependency hell and have to operate outside the normal packaging system. Same for users who want to consume this. Third party apt repositories and similar efforts are all fundamentally hacks and generally all end up breaking users' systems sooner or later. Often this is discovered only on a subsequent distribution upgrade and users are unable to attribute distribution upgrade failures to the hacked third party software installation they did months or years ago. The second model is the bundled model. Ship all the dependencies bundled in the software itself. That's what Snaps (and Flatpaks, and AppImage) do - same as iOS and Android. This allows one build to work on all distributions and distribution releases. They can be installed and removed without leaving cruft or a broken system behind. They allow security sandboxing. All your objections seem to be criticizing the bundled model itself, rather than anything about Snaps themselves except that they use the bundled model. If you don't like the bundled model, then you can carry on using Ubuntu 20.04 without Snaps just fine.
    • codethief 6y ago
      I agree with everything you write, except: > If you don't like the bundled model, then you can carry on using Ubuntu 20.04 without Snaps just fine. No, you can't. Ubuntu has started replacing apt packages with snaps. So if you want to install those packages (such as Chromium) you now have to use the snap.
      • rlpb 6y ago
        You can install Chromium from a third party source just like you could before. New distribution releases always add and remove packages. Chromium has been removed (as a deb). It's is no longer packaged as a deb because it's a rolling release upstream and it was too much work to backport featureful rolling release to debs.
  • johnchristopher 6y ago
    > Just fix the bugs and leave the rest to the application developers. Some dev flat out[0] refuse (and I am not debating if it's right or wrong) to package their app for every distro (even major ones: ubuntu, debian, arch, rhel/fedora) so it's up to distro maintainers to package them so users are always at the end of a line of other people packaging the apps (either through distro packages or sandboxed one click installer). [0] Words are too strong and user CJefferson https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24384206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24384206 is right to call me out on that. I agree, sorry about that. Poor choice of words. I had a very specific example in mind but there's obviously a whole gamut of reasons for not packaging. My position is that we can't nor should we expect dev to package their apps for the distro we use. Also it's no like app devs and distro/os devs/maintainers are living in hermetic boxes and their code/apps never interacting or evolving. Not editing out for context.
    • CJefferson 6y ago
      I don't like "flat-out refuse". I don't "refuse" to package my apps for every distro any more than I "refuse" to do my neighbour's gardening. I tried packaging for Debian once and after 2 days I have up -- I have neither the time or patience to do work for distros I don't use for free.
      • _jal 6y ago
        Yeah, there's more than a whiff of entitlement to that phrasing. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend looking at fpm for packaging. Unless you're doing something weird or need an obscure format, it is the tool you want. https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm
        • thom 6y ago
          [dead]
          • _jal 6y ago
            Read it again. I'm agreeing with the parent.
  • derefr 6y ago
    Dynamic linking and containers aren’t necessarily incompatible, though nobody has combined them well yet. Of course, half the point of containers is to “vendor” your dependencies — a container-image is the output of a release-management process. So the symbolic reference part of dynamic linking is an undesired goal here: the container is supposed to reference a specific version of its libraries. But that reference can be just a reference. There’s nothing stopping container-images from being just the app, plus a deterministic formula for hard-linking together the rest of the environment that the app is going to run in, from a content-addressable store/cache that lives on the host. With a design like this, you’d still only have one libimagemagick.so.6.0.1 on your system (or whatever), just hard-linked under a bunch of different chroots; and so all the containers that wanted to load that library at runtime, would be sharing their mmap(2) regions from the single on-disk copy of the file.
    • freeone3000 6y ago
      Hey, you've invented WinSxS. The primary issue with this approach is that if every program only sees its own version of the library anyway, there's no incentive to coordinate around library versions - you end up with tons of versions of everything anyway, maybe not one for every application but close to.
      • derefr 6y ago
        > Hey, you’ve invented WinSxS. Oh, I know :) > there’s no incentive to coordinate True, but it potentially works out anyway, for several reasons that end up covering most libraries: • libraries that just doesn’t change very often, are going to be “coordinated on” by default. • people building these container-images are the same people who actually tend to be running them in production, so they (unlike distro authors) actually feel the constraint of memory pressure; so they, at development time, have an incentive to push back on library authors to factor their libraries into fast-changing business layers wrapping slower-changing cores, where the business-layer library in turn dynamically links the core library. This is how huge libraries like browser runtimes tend to work: one glue layer that gets updates all the time, that dynamically links slower-moving targets like the media codec libraries, JavaScript runtime, etc. Those slower-moving libs can end up shared at runtime, even if the top-level library isn’t. • on large container hosts, the most common libs are not app-layer libs, but rather base-layer libs, e.g. libc, libm, libresolv, ncurses, libpam, etc. These are going to be common to anything that uses the same base image (e.g. Ubuntu 20.04). Although these do receive bug-fix updates, those updates will end up as updates to the base-layer image, which will in turn cause the downstream container-images to be rebuilt under many container hosts. • Homogenous workloads! Right now, due to software-design choices, many container orchestrators won’t ensure library-sharing even between multiple running instances of the same container-image. We could fix this issue without fixing the rest of this, but designing a container-orchestrator architecture around DLL-sharing generally, would also coincidentally solve this specific instance of it.
  • dheera 6y ago
    > The whole idea that you'd need a container like environment to install an application Simple example. App A wants tensorflow 1.10, CUDA 8, and python 3.7. App B wants tensorflow 2.2, CUDA 10, and python 3.8. You want App A and B installed at the same time but the two versions of tensorflow are neither forward nor backward compatible. The two pythons will fight with each other for who gets to be "python3". How do you deal with this without containerization? I don't think it violates the principles of open source at all, it's just making sure each application gets the exact versions of libraries it wants without messing up the rest of your system.
    • jacquesm 6y ago
      > You want App A and B installed at the same time but the two versions of tensorflow are neither forward nor backward compatible. And that's the exact problem. Instead of solving it in the proper way you end up with kludge-on-kludge to paper this over. Backwards compatibility is a great good, you let it go only if you absolutely have to rather than because you can upgrade stuff so easily. > The two pythons will fight with each other for who gets to be "python3" An even clearer case, obviously python 3.8 should be backwards compatible with 3.7.
      • dheera 6y ago
        > obviously python 3.8 should be backwards compatible with 3.7 I think so too, but HN downvoted me to oblivion the last time I advocated for that. That's part of the problem, I guess, is that the dev community doesn't actually agree with 3.8 being backwards compatible with 3.7.
        • nomdep 6y ago
          Would you argue the same if they were called Python v37.0 and v38.0? Let's imagine that they are and move on. The problem is to use the alias "python3" as if it were the executable name.
          • dheera 6y ago
  • Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    > Might as well ship a pre-linked binary that just does system calls. I actually think that’s exactly what we should do. Containers are an over-engineered solution for a problem that never needed to exist. Dynamic linking doesn’t work unless you can live inside a distro maintainer’s special bubble for all your software. If you can exist in that bubble, great—I really like Debian for certain use-cases—but if you can't, the benefits of dynamic linking everything are clearly outweighed by the drawbacks.
    • rkagerer 6y ago
      I agree. Are there any major disadvantages to that, aside from size and having to wait for each application to update its own dependancies?
      • nycticorax 6y ago
        The 'horror story' people always mention, which is a special case of "having to wait for each application to update its own dependencies", is that if there's a security vulnerability in a much-used library, you have to wait for each application maintainer to update their application, rather than simply having the distribution maintainer update the shared library. I'm not sure I agree that this would be worse than the current situation...
      • MiroF 6y ago
        Are there any major disadvantages to a nuclear winter, besides that everyone would die and the environment would be destroyed?
        • nycticorax 6y ago
          I just honestly don't understand this. On Windows and Mac (the OSes that 99% of the planet uses on the desktop), this is exactly how things work. The OS provides a set of APIs. If an application author needs a library that isn't in the OS, they have to ship it themselves. If a vulnerability in that library comes to light, they have to fix it and ship an updated version of your application. If it's a commonly used library, a lot of application authors are going to have to ship updates. Why couldn't this work for a Linux-based OS? Honest question.
  • GekkePrutser 6y ago
    We're already there. The snap store is not open source and can only be run by canonical.
    • stjohnswarts 6y ago
      This is the biggest downside for me. I understand why they want to use snaps of huge software applications especially for rolling releases. I just don't like one company being in charge of the method of distribution.
      • GekkePrutser 6y ago
        Yes indeed, I don't mind snaps for the really big third party stuff. But they were using it for literally everything. Even htop was snapped at one point. Seriously... :/ Clearly they are looking for a way to put some kind of proprietary dependency in Linux by propagating snap to other distros so they can then milk it for cash (e.g. charging a fee for access to the snap store to big publishers like Microsoft/Google). I don't think they realise the mainstream Linux users will hate it for exactly that reason.
        • johnisgood 6y ago
          There are many reasons to hate snap for. I have a comment that explains it in more detail, but seriously, this is the most anti-FOSS, anti-Linux crap I have ever encountered. Shame on Canonical.
  • radmuzom 6y ago
    Open source never had any principles. Open source is just a libertarian hijack of free software to ensure that it is accessible to companies without any legal issues.
  • rsync 6y ago
    "What's the point of dynamic linking if we then end up shipping half an OS with an application just to get around dependency hell? Might as well ship a pre-linked binary that just does system calls." I'm curious - are there any Linux distributions that contain nothing but fully static, self-contained binary executables ? As in, ships with no libraries ?
  • z3t4 6y ago
    Statically linked binaries with an apparmor profile is not such a bad idea.
  • heavyset_go 6y ago
    > What's the point of dynamic linking There's a certain subset of developers who are against dynamic linking at all, and they do have some convincing arguments that are worth reading. I don't necessarily agree with them, but their arguments are worth acknowledging.
  • diegocg 6y ago
    Original Unix didn't support dynamic linking (despite having already been invented), and for some purists it was a mistake to add support for it. Plan 9 refused to add support for it. Dynamic linking is not some kind of holy principle.
    • ifmpx 6y ago
      Perhaps, but dynamic linking solves a very important set of problems (Speed, storage, memory, bandwidth, ...etc).
      • higerordermap 6y ago
        Security update problem.
  • swiley 6y ago
    Canonical has been doing this sort of thing for a very long time, they way Ubuntu tough was designed should have been enough to make most people abandon them.
  • tracker1 6y ago
    It's about sandboxing your apps... though not every app needs to, or should be sandboxed, but plenty can and should be. I happen to like flatpak a bit more, just feels like a more open community, and appimage is okay as well. It's about getting dependencies with the app. I can't tell you the number of times I borked my OS install because I wanted a version of a single application that had a feature newer than a year or two old version supported in my distro's repository. It helps to have both as options.
  • neop1x 6y ago
    Thankfully both Arch Linux and Gentoo have native Chromium and don't require Snap. I can recommend them to everyone. Arch is more practical for everyday use though as compilations take time.
• bzb5 6y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23052108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23052108
  • jessaustin 6y ago
    TFA: The article has been updated to accommodate changes since the original four months ago.
• dddw 6y ago
  Don't know why Ubuntu keeps pushing it, especially on serverside this is very undesirable. Also the extra options of flatpak and appimage on desktop are more than adequate
  • AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
    They keep pushing it because it makes it much easier for Canonical employees to package stuff like Chromium.
    • timbit42 6y ago
      So users are less important than their employees? Doesn't sound like sound business plan.
      • Avamander 6y ago
        Users are less important than their employees and paying customers. I've been told that rather clearly by a canonical employee in Ubuntu's issue tracker.
      • AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
        Admittedly my source is the Ubuntu podcast, and it would probably take me awhile to find the exact quote, but according to the employees, they previously had one or two employees whose full time job was simply maintaining the Chromium deb package. Switching to snaps made it much easier and freed them up to do other things. I think we should consider snaps like any other framework, be it deb, flatpak, or even something like Electron: some of them have serious downsides, but people choose them because it allows them to more easily push a single binary out to multiple platforms rather than being bogged down in maintaining a distinct build procedure for Windows/Mac/Deb-based/RPM-based/Arch/Solus/every other percent-of-a-percent Linux distro. I don't like snaps either--I much prefer flatpaks. But I don't think it's constructive to insult Canonical employees for wanting to make their own jobs easier while they work to provide you a free product.
  • sascha_sl 6y ago
• northrup 6y ago
  I LOATHE this direction that Canonical is taking as SNAP is such a steaming pile of shit and it’s being shoved down everyone’s throats. It’s going to be the thing that makes me abandon Ubuntu. It was a neat idea in concept, it’s been horribly executed. If I wanted what you’re trying to push Canonical I’d just rub Qubes OS. Please give SNAP the quick death it needs and deserves!
  • dheera 6y ago
    Same thing they did with Unity they keep shoving at everyone. I still hate that stuff. I don't need my Linux system to be Mac-like. I'd be using a Mac if I liked Macs.
    • Avamander 6y ago
      Unity was actually rather good though. Snap... has a ton of problems that makes it very much not so.
      • mixmastamyk 6y ago
        There were several misdesigns in it that they would not allow the option to change. That and other missteps always doom their projects.
    • nycticorax 6y ago
      The one ray of hope there is that they eventually gave up on Unity. Hopefully they will give up on snaps also...
    • GekkePrutser 6y ago
      And upstart. And Mir.
• 3np 6y ago
  Peak Ubuntu was 18.04 LTS :( But, maybe it's not a bad thing - consider that this maps closely to the app store experiences on both Windows and OS X today. Perhaps it's a great decision for the future users of Ubuntu but not for the current users of Ubuntu. It could turn out beneficial for both Ubuntu and Debian, as I imagine many will switch over. And as much as I'm married to my current X11, it's pretty cool to see them push Wayland through. Ubuntu is not for me anymore, but I still appreciate what they have done and are still doing for Linux, regardless of what I think of their product and market decisions. Looks like Mint/MATE is the new Ubuntu for desktop and Debian has always been for server?
  • stOneskull 6y ago
    MX Linux is good
    • 3np 6y ago
      Yeah, but given the difference in ideology and stance on most notably systemd, I don't think it can be called "a new Ubuntu" :)
• tsjq 6y ago
  what is the main problem this snap thing is looking to address ?
  • beefhash 6y ago
    Upstream moving faster than downstream Linux distributions can possibly keep up with.
    • gspr 6y ago
      The proper solution is for upstream to behave.
      • wander_homer 6y ago
        If you're solution to the issue is, that upstream may only depend on 10 year old API/ABIs, then I'll gladly misbehave. Why should I hold back my software for old, but still supported distributions like RHEL 6?
        • gspr 6y ago
          There's a lot between "depending on 10 year old APIs" and the "we release every 7 days, you can only assume last week's version is supported" that is all the rage these days.
          • wander_homer 6y ago
            Once people pay me enough to maintain old versions, I'll gladly spend some time on it. Until then I'd rather look forward and use my limited time on things I care about and if a new API allows me to do that quicker, easier or more reliably, then I'm all in.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • rlpb 6y ago
    > what is the main problem this snap thing is looking to address ? Third party software developers wanting to push their latest software releases directly to users, and for users wanting to install such software. For users who are happy to use the traditional distribution-curated model, getting all "feature" software updates when doing a distribution release upgrade only, snaps are not necessary and you can use Ubuntu 20.04 perfectly fine, as normal, without using snaps.
• MichaelStubbs 6y ago
  I have a similar outlook. I kept complaining and basically the answer comes down to "if you don't like it, leave" - so I did. I understand it's not appropriate for all use cases but Manjaro has been an absolute dream for me so far.
• superkuh 6y ago
  All these containerization "solutions" are just the fever symptoms of the future shock from the extremely rapid rate of features and improvement in the underlying libraries (glibc, c++?, etc) used by programmers, and the programmer's tendency to use those fancy new features asap. It makes compiling, or even running, something written today on the dev environment of a 5 year old linux distro pretty darn difficult and worse with time.
• michaelhoffman 6y ago
  I've been running Ubuntu 20.04 on WSL2 and haven't had any issues with snap being pushed on me—mainly because I don't use the Ubuntu store and have everything installed through apt on the command-line.
  • weikju 6y ago
    If you’ve installed Chromium, lxd, (or in prior releases the gnome calculator), even with apt, you’ve installed snaps. Even without using the snap store. That’s the sneaky part that bothers a lot of people and makes it seem like snaps are forced on users.
    • Lev1a 6y ago
      In previous releases I wondered why such a small basic program like the Gnome Calculator would take several seconds to start from the time I clicked the icon in the "Activities" screen. Then when the whole 20.04 and forced Snap thing came to my attention I simply uninstalled the snap version and installed the proper version through apt. Now the program pops up instantly when I start it. This single interaction basically turned me off snaps from then on.
• rlpb 6y ago
  Remember that snaps solve the problem of third parties wanting to ship software directly to users. If you don't want to consume such software, then you don't need to use snaps, and don't need to care that Ubuntu 20.04 supports snaps. The system works perfectly well without them. Snaps aren't being "forced". If you insist on using curl piped to sh to install third party software, you can still do that, or use any other third party mechanism in between. Too often snap critics conflate the installation of the third party software use case with the distribution itself. Ubuntu 20.04 itself is based on debs, not snaps, and the distribution itself continues to work using apt as always. Claiming that installing another distribution to "solve" this nonexistent problem is disingenuous.
  • KozmoNau7 6y ago
    That is incorrect. In 20.04, among others the Chromium package is a blank .deb file that installs a snap package instead. You can't choose to install the .deb version instead, unless you add an unofficial repo. That is absolutely forcing snap on people, since Chromium was a standard .dep package in the previous releases. And it's not the only package where the transition to snap is forced.
    • rlpb 6y ago
      Chromium is not packaged using debs in Ubuntu. Firefox is the default supported browser, as it has been for many years, and that works perfectly fine as a deb. The reason the Chromium deb package pulls in a snap is so that users upgrading from 18.04 or 19.10 continue to get a working Chromium. If you have disabled snaps, then apt will not pull in the Chromium snap. > That is absolutely forcing snap on people, since Chromium was a standard .dep package in the previous release. It really isn't. The default web browser works fine and isn't a snap. Chromium has never been installed by default on Ubuntu.
      • simion314 6y ago
        This makes perfect sense, not sure why I only see this explained until now and only the stupid complains about Chromium.
• KozmoNau7 6y ago
  I'd been happy with KDE Neon for a while, but since the upgrade to the Ubuntu 20.04 base, snap became so annoying that I switched all of my machines to openSUSE. Snap is an endless source of frustration. Unless you jump through a bunch of hoops, apps can't access network mounts, you have the obligatory ~/snap folder, startup times are atrocious, and I'm seeing a number of weird glitches especially in Chromium. Flatpak is marginally better, but has a lot of similar issues.
• FeatureIncomple 6y ago
  What's the best Ubuntu alternative out there? I dislike Snap, but I like the stable / out-of-the-box nature of Ubuntu. I don't like distros where I take a week to setup it the way I like.
  • 4d66ba06 6y ago
    I've enjoyed Pop!_OS
  • storrgie 6y ago
    fedora+rpmfusion+flathub silverblue effectively gives you the ability to have the benefits of a rolling distro and the benefits of a distro that does releases (stability focused).
  • benjaminjackman 6y ago
    So I asked that question a couple months ago and the response that sounded most like a drop in replacement (and better in a lot of ways) was Pop!_OS. I haven't had the time to try it out yet ... maybe a good weekend project. I've been using Ubuntu for over a decade now so it might take some time to switch over.
    • neckardt 6y ago
      I've been slowly switching over all of my desktops and servers from Ubuntu to Debian. The only annoying situation I've encountered is having to manually install a non-free network driver, but once that's done I haven't found a single thing I miss from Ubuntu.
    • MattPalmer1086 6y ago
      I recently moved from Ubuntu 18.04 to Pop OS 20.05. So far everything works smoothly, and no snap.
  • gspr 6y ago
    > What's the best Ubuntu alternative out there? Debian.
• CarelessExpert 6y ago
  Well, I'll be that guy: I don't get all the complaining about snaps. First, I use the command line for package installation and couldn't care less if the store experience is suboptimal. Second, I use Firefox and anything that discourages people from feeding the Chrome monopoly, frankly, that sounds like a good thing to me. Third, for some desktop apps I want auto updates. Having an option for some software to be on the latest is pretty slick and previously could only be solved with PPAs, which had their own problems (maintainer headaches, dependency issues, etc). Would I want them on a server? No. As a desktop (well, laptop) user, do I want all my software deployed with snaps and auto updating willy-nilly? Also no. But as a desktop user, I appreciate that I have the choice. And by lowering the barrier for maintainers who no longer have to worry about multiple distro versions, dependencies, etc, it means I get more software options. Sounds good to me!
  • sascha_sl 6y ago
    You're essentially saying "I don't care because nobody tried to trick me specifically into installing a snap if I wanted a debian package" - I hope you know that on the way forward, Firefox will be snap-shimmed too. The Enterprise Linux ecosystem is a solid alternative to Ubuntu. Fedora for desktop and either CentOS or Fedora for servers, depending on how stable they need to be and how much maintenance you're willing to do.
    • KozmoNau7 6y ago
      And SUSE/openSUSE for an alternative in the same segment. Very similar roots, also RPM-based, but with a different take on things, such as using Btrfs and KDE by default, which I prefer.
      • nix23 6y ago
        SUSE (the enterprise edition) uses Gnome as default, i love Opensuse Tumbleweed, but i think Gnome (with the SLES-look) is much more stable than KDE. Anyway i use i3 nearly exclusive. BTW: KDE is not the default, it's just the first in the list :)
      • 6y ago
• avh02 6y ago
  Unrelated to the main thread, but > "I have a soft spot for it, especially the amazing Unity days." I found that funny since unity was why I left ubuntu (sort of, cos Linux mint) until I discovered i3wm and came back without unity's stupidity.
• fractalb 6y ago
  I haven't dealt with snaps yet. Isn't there really any way to disable snaps? Not even an obscure one?
  • sascha_sl 6y ago
    You can remove snapd on servers, but on the desktop Gnome itself and a lot of standard desktop apps are snaps, so it becomes much harder to avoid.
  • pmontra 6y ago
    https://cialu.net/how-to-disable-and-remove-completely-snaps-in-ubuntu-linux/ https://cialu.net/how-to-disable-and-remove-completely-snaps...
• washadjeffmad 6y ago
  They haven't been on my radar since the Amazon Lens integration, but in light of snap, what does Canonical's near-future goal for Ubuntu Desktop look like? Also, why snaps?
• loopz 6y ago
  Mint steers away from snap by default. I like the approach, and Mint 20 Xfce has been an absolute DREAM to install from scratch. Sane basic install, auto-upgrades that lets you choose, possibility to restore OS to previous snapshots and good polish overall. Intuitive and lean interface that lets you mute all notifications. Currently playing Elders Scrolls Online with Lutris (sorry for the internet downtime, was my first character creation ;). Also playing with minikube and docker to sharpen up some knowledge. All the modern toys easily within reach, making this another year of linux desktop use, only happier with a new nice clean install of a modern solution that mostly works very well. 1 search resolved audio issue for good, everything else was provided from OS. Something like snap breaks too much of all these community-efforts, that I can only reject it vehemently.
  • inetknght 6y ago
    > Sane basic install I think Mint's installation is too dumbed down tbqh. But, that said, I use Mint on all of the computers that I don't want to spend time to personalize.
    • drdeadringer 6y ago
      I use Linux Mint on all of my home computers. I personalize all of them to my needs and I do not find it hard or difficult or time-consuming. I find the installation process straight forward. Perhaps however you have more intense personal customization needs than I.
      • loopz 6y ago
        Just a hunch, but he probably means disk partitioning, allocating a partition for swap and other such stuff you can customize most easily during installation. It's nice to have excellent options for that, but I seriously don't have that as a deep need right now personally.
• lordgroff 6y ago
  I wonder if snaps will actually survive. The history of Ubuntu specific innovations seems to be that they invariably fail. But it's never not for the lack of trying, so it only makes sense that Ubuntu is trying to push this on the users hard. I do run 20.04, and one of the first things I did was disable the snap store and enable flatpaks.
  • scaryclam 6y ago
    Do you have a link to a tutorial on doing that? If not, no worries, I'm sure I can find one. I was going to install Ubuntu for my Dad as he's tired of Windows and seriously don't want to have to do tech support every other week because a third party decided it was upgrade time and he doesn't know why something changed. That's the sort of WTF he's sick of Windows for :( Ubuntu seem to be getting more and more user hostile as they go.
    • lordgroff 6y ago
      Sure: https://www.kevin-custer.com/blog/disabling-snaps-in-ubuntu-20-04/ https://www.kevin-custer.com/blog/disabling-snaps-in-ubuntu-...
      • tsjq 6y ago
        thanks . that's helpful
    • nuker 6y ago
      Be nice to your Dad and buy him a macbook or Mac Mini
• wazoox 6y ago
  I switched to Pop_OS precisely because it doesn't support snaps. Snap is arguably half-free : the server isn't free at all, no working free implementation exists. Therefore I don't want any snaps. Flatpak is OK. This is all part of a sneaky attempt to get free software in control: Microsoft grabbing more and more power in the Linux Foundation, RMS ousted from the FSF, GitHub becoming more and more central as a default go-to-hosting (beware of Github!)... All of these are part of a dangerous trend of appropriation and control by well-known monopolists. Don't fall for it. The GAFAM aren't nice guys.
  • ancarda 6y ago
    >beware of Github! I've been slowly moving off GitHub to SourceHut, and it's been a breath of fresh air knowing that not only is all the software free (so you can self host) but the maintainer (Drew DeVault) is also quite committed to keeping it that way. I feel like I'm in safe hands. Thankfully it's not yet another GitHub clone, but built around git+email -- so it's far more decentralized by nature. https://sourcehut.org/ https://sourcehut.org/
• IgorPartola 6y ago
  I will say that half of these complaints are not valid. For example: Snap store navigation sucks? apt has no navigation at all. Chromium is a snap app? Compile from scratch or add an alternative apt repo. The only real complaint I see here is that automatic updates don’t allow you to control them. That is a real shame but also isn’t inherent in the design of snaps so could be fixed. Part of the problem is that making .deb packages is an arcane art. I wish it wasn’t. And dependency hell of “well this version of the distro comes with libxxx 1.1 and the other one has 1.0.7 and now I need to build multiple versions of the package just to make it work for 20.04 and 18.04” does suck. I do love Debian as a platform and I don’t use snap, but I also use macOS as my desktop OS and guess how Chrome is packaged and installed there?
  • httpsterio 6y ago
    What I hate about snap is that it hijacks apt installs on Ubuntu. On WSL snap is not supported and when I tried to apt install Chrome, the install fails because it attempts to install it with snap. If I had a visual way of installing snaps with the Ubuntu app store, I would use it no prob but adding 3rd party repos isn't a viable option for me when I could make do with the default vetted repos. I had to change my CI/CD config where I ran accessibility tests with Chrome's web driver into another distro because Ubuntu broke their previously functioning functions. Building from source would be possible but it's slow and costly to run for every commit.
  • jula432vdf 6y ago
    Snaps are SLOW, chromium, and several other apps I tried, they start sloooowly. It is clearly a NO GO Canonical, you can't ship slower apps (that start in 3-5 seconds), that out of snap (or in Windows), start in less than a seconds. snapped Chromium takes 3-5 seconds in its first start in a 16GB ram, corei 5, ssd based machine. WHAT? In the same hardware the .deb Chromium takes maybe half a second to load and be fully responsive. The occurs with LOTS of software, and yeah, the start time of an app IS a thing. If something takes more than half a second to start, and you know it is A LOT faster, you end up pissed off, What have they done with MY hardware and why? If Canonical start to annoy me with many more packages forced to snap like chromium, I'll be jumping to whatever distro lets me start MY apps in less than a second, as it is usual in 2020. And if this unfinished, unpollished crap starts to show off in Ubuntu server in its current sorry state, I cannot express how fast I will be ditching LTS for Debian or anything "not snapped". You NEED to make this thing to start A LOT FASTER, and stop making "end user assumptions" about what you could mess up behind scenes in the system (yeah, you could end stomping actually useful things like sleeping in notebooks).
• jarym 6y ago
  Once again I live mostly outside of the Ubuntu desktop world except for a few servers I have running. Dumb question here, but why 'should' a package management system (I imagine the job of which is predominantly installation/update/removal of software) impact the load time of a package once installed?
  • sgc 6y ago
    My guess would be checking the internet to see if there is an update available before launch.
  • rlpb 6y ago
    Snaps are shipped as compressed squashfs images that are dynamically read at runtime rather than being extracted to your filesystem at install time. The trade-off is that you win on hard disk usage and installation / revert time, but the payment is increased startup time.
• jrockway 6y ago
  Snap was neat when I first discovered it. I could get some bleeding-edge dependencies automatically delivered to my machine, without building it from source or having to manually update it. Wonderful! But the problem is: it's the slowest thing in the world. I've complained about this on HN before, but it can be hundreds of milliseconds from when you type a command to when the actual application starts running -- the intermediate time is being consumed by Snap doing god knows what. The slowness is a dealbreaker for me. My disk can read 500,000 4k blocks per second. My RAM can do 3400M transactions per second. I have 32 CPU cores. How is loading some bytes into RAM and telling the CPU to start executing instructions something that can take more than a few microseconds!? Easy: run that app with Snap! I blew up my Ubuntu install and switched back to Debian. I haven't missed Ubuntu at all. I am resigned to the fact that if I care about a particular piece of software because it's the reason I use a computer (go, Emacs, Node, etc.) then I just have to maintain it myself. There simply isn't a good way right now. And you know what? It's fine. Everything is configured exactly the way I like, and it will never change unless I change it.
  • codethief 6y ago
    > But the problem is: it's the slowest thing in the world. Exactly. I recently had to replace Chromium with Google Chrome just because the Ubuntu maintainers thought it'd be a good idea to replace the Chromium apt package with an installer that pulls in the snap… Good thing Firefox is my main browser and I only use Chromium/Chrome for testing (and whenever websites forget that there's more than just one browser to test for), otherwise I would have long ditched Ubuntu, too.
    • dessant 6y ago
      I've been getting bug reports for a browser extension because of Snap. The file system isolation of Snap and Flatpak breaks Native Messaging, so extensions that need to communicate with a local app, such as password managers, are now broken. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+bug/1741074 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+...
      • 6y ago
• jto1218 6y ago
  Linux Mint 20, which is based on Ubuntu 20.04, ships without any snaps or snapd, and has some kind of mechanism to prevent snapd from being installed by apt. Might be a good option for folks that like Ubuntu but want to avoid the snap fiasco.
  • Shared404 6y ago
    Pop!_OS also avoids snap, opting for flatpak support instead.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• sugarsnaps 6y ago
  This reminds me of the whole systemd debacle - hundreds of Linux curmudgeons getting unreasonably angry about an improvement to their distribution of choice, just because it's different to what they're used to. The great thing about free and open source software is, if a distribution or package maintainer does something you don't like, you don't have to use it. Simply modify to suit your desires, and enjoy. But I guess it's easier to just complain loudly and with an inflated sense of entitlement, despite not having put in any work whatsoever.
  • ohazi 6y ago
    I disagree. Systemd did things differently, sometimes annoyingly, but the intention was still to allow you to control your own system. It also ate other projects (e.g. udev) and sprouted features (resolved, timedated, etc.) making it difficult to untangle, but it was/is still possible to do so. The biggest complaints I see about snap as currently implemented are related to making arbitrary outbound network connections, automatic updates that you can't disable, and inability to mirror or vendor snaps or an entire archive / repo. These don't seem similar to me at all. Systemd is opinionated, perhaps in a non-unix-philosophy way, but still preserves users' freedom. Snapd does not. If you have a system with snapd, your system is doing things that you can't disable without replacing the system wholesale. The Microsoft-levels of telemetry and lack of control seem to me clearly worse in every way than anything that was ever wrong with systemd. I don't actually believe that snapd is irredeemable, and think that these things will eventually be fixed, either as they progress on their roadmap, or as a response to user outrage. But I don't really understand how it got shipped in such a state. In particular, the non-disableable silent updates seem to me like a complete non-starter for a server operating system. How are you supposed to schedule maintenance? What were they thinking?
  • im3w1l 6y ago
    If your software auto-updates, then you no longer own your device. Anti-features, spying can be pushed onto it from above and you have no choice but to accept it. I like auto-updates. I almost always turn them on. But being able to turn them off is an important bargaining chip, to pressure devs to behave. I'm not excited about giving that up.
• codethief 6y ago
  > RMS ousted from the FSF Wtf. Looks like I must have been living under a rock! What happened?
  • wazoox 6y ago
    He has been accused of sexual harassment by someone. In the usual "cancel culture" fashion, you're deemed guilty until irrevocably proved innocent, therefore RMS has been ousted from the FSF and the MIT. A proof if you needed one that the "SJW" or "baizuo" culture isn't at all progressive, but a dangerous intolerant bunch more akin to the Khmer Rouge than anything else.
    • scaryclam 6y ago
      Sorry, but there's a lot more to it that a simple one-off sexual harassment accusation.
      • notsureaboutpg 6y ago
        There is more to it but it is also a "cancel culture" moment if there ever was one. I think history will look back on his ousting as part of a mass hysteria, but I don't agree with OP about likening it to the Khmer Rouge (messed up, that)
      • codethief 6y ago
        Can you elaborate? At least the ZDNet article you posted doesn't exactly corroborate your statement. (Not taking a stance for/against RMS here – I still don't really understand what happened.)
        • mixmastamyk 6y ago
          See the daring fireball link up thread.
        • dabockster 6y ago
          There were some Tweets by some women AI researchers at MIT about RMS's lewd behavior towards them. The kind of behavior that would have gotten a lesser man burned at the stake (metaphorically, of course).
• systematical 6y ago
  I rarely find myself fixing things in Ubuntu, there is a level of acceptance though on certain things not always panning out the way I'd want. I've gotten very good a reading reviews on peripherals I buy to make sure they are compatible. There is the occasional UI glitch as well. I will probably use a different O.S. once I move laptops in three years (I buy a new laptop once every 5 years). Regarding MacOS. I am using this for the first time at work and I don't know how you could go from a rich APT ecosystem to a so-so brew ecosystem. And really fuck the Command Key and all the other weird Mac-isms. I don't see the value in that over priced hipster operating system, but if thats where your at home than enjoy your home. Oh and I'm still trying to figure out if Docker is a comedy or tragedy on Mac.
• nickysielicki 6y ago
  When Ubuntu killed Mir and Upstart and adopted Wayland/Gnome and systemd, they really invested into a whole competing desktop ecosystem (freedesktop) and it was shortsighted of them to not see that they would not be able to just take bits and pieces. They were never going to compete with flatpak (aka xdg-portals, from freedesktop). My point is that this has been in the making for years now. They didn't fail to deliver a good product, snaps just should have died when the rest of the Ubuntu differentiation on the desktop did. It's frustrating because for most people, trying linux on the desktop means trying Ubuntu. Freedesktop has succeeded in making a cohesive desktop environment atop linux that is as polished as commercial offerings, but Ubuntu doesn't make that accessible. My advice to anyone who hasn't tried linux on the desktop lately: try Fedora or Debian on a live CD. I think you'll be impressed, especially if you're coming from Ubuntu. Unadulterated gnome3 is a breath of fresh air.
• rubyist5eva 6y ago
  Switched to Debian because of all this useless Ubuntu crap. Never looked back.
• dorfsmay 6y ago
  The only reason I have been using Ubuntu is because it was the distro with the most installable software available. I'm ok with default GNOME, I'm beyond cool desktop, I just want something that works. On the other hand I need to be able to install a large selection of software easily, and recent-ish versions of them (hence why not Debian). I also can't have things that upgrade themselves on their own schedule (kids in school with capped bandwidth). Having done it myself in the past, I understand how taxing creating official .deb and .rpm is for the developers, and how difficult dependencies issues are. Given how Ubuntu is digging itself into the snap hole, what's the best solution here? Why pick Flatpack vs Appimage? Reading about it they both seem to have pros and cons. I see a lots of PopOS proponents here, but found that they don't produce that many .deb packages, and the choice will dwindle as Ubuntu's moving more and more stuff to snap. It also was a lot of work to un-customize (going back to a vanilla GNOME). I'd honestly be happy with even Fedora, if I could easily install most OSS.
  • Delk 6y ago
    Out of general interest, which kinds of OSS have you come across that aren't packaged for Fedora? I'm sure there are obviously some; anything proprietary or with patent encumbrance requires using rpmfusion or something, and that may be a step further than enabling multiverse. Some stuff just might not be packaged. Ubuntu and Debian repositories are also exceptionally broad. But I can't, right off the top of my head, think of that much of OSS that I couldn't install either from the official repos or rpmfusion. Maybe I've just forgotten about any loops I had to jump through, but I've been using Fedora for about six years now (after moving from Ubuntu), and I've found that the repos are much richer than I thought they were. But maybe I just haven't run into the holes that you have found. There are some things I preferred about Ubuntu, but generally things have been working surprisingly well for me.
    • dorfsmay 6y ago
      Last time I had checked, the issue were with software with non-free codec and smaller more niche software, but checking rpm repositories there isn't a software I'm missing yet. I'm definitely going to have another look at Fedora and OpenSuse for that matter (specifically their rolling version for small single service servers). Thanks for your comment.
• Zardoz84 6y ago
  my personal solution : Use Kubuntu and ignore snap stuff and use Firefox instead of Chrome
• BiteCode_dev 6y ago
  I run ubuntu 20.04 and don't have one single snap installed. If you can switch distro, surely you have the skill to just ignore snaps and use ubuntu like a regular debian system. It required zero effort on my part at least.
  • kilburn 6y ago
    This comment seems very condescending and doesn't bring anything to the conversation. There's many people in this thread stating that: 1. Ubuntu is replacing "standard" apt packages with packages apt packages that just install the snap version. 2. Many snap packages have bugs that are caused by the snap setup itself. Thus, it is impossible for these users to "just ignore snaps and use ubuntu like a regular debian system".
    • BiteCode_dev 6y ago
      Just use ubuntu like you did before snaps. No change to make. It works as before. All the debs are still here. The ppa. The apt. Let others figure out the snap debacle.
      • SahAssar 6y ago
        The chromium apt package isn't there, which is one often pointed to example.
• tvaughan 6y ago
  Snaps aren't supported inside Linux containers. Chromium headless is now snap-only, therefore Ubuntu can't be used to run our frontend tests. Switched to Fedora 32 almost immediately. Didn't even bother to search for a workaround.
• guiambros 6y ago
  Just remove snap [1] and move on with your life. That's the very first thing I do in every single Ubuntu installation for years (including 20.04), and never had any problem. At least in my case I don't need / don't want any kind of app store in my system (but I understand this is not for everyone; less technical users may not be inclined to installing .deb packages using command line). And I still follow this thread [2], hoping one day they will clean up the $HOME/snap directory and fix the performance so gnome-calculator doesn't take several seconds to load, but I'm keeping my hopes low. [1] https://www.kevin-custer.com/blog/disabling-snaps-in-ubuntu-20-04/ https://www.kevin-custer.com/blog/disabling-snaps-in-ubuntu-... [2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1575053 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1575053
  • timbit42 6y ago
    So how do you install Chromium without their snap? Is installing non-snap Chromium as easy as installing non-snap packages in their repo? If not, I'd rather use Linux Mint.
    • anoncake 6y ago
      Since LM is based on Ubuntu, if you can install Chromium there using a deb, the same package/repo should work on Ubuntu.
    • nycticorax 6y ago
      I'm not saying that you should do this, necessarily, but I just installed regular Chrome from the Google .deb. That also fixed an issue with snap-Chromium not handling web app shortcuts properly.
    • guiambros 6y ago
      The bad decision here is not "Ubuntu's snap obsession" as OP claims, but the decision by the Chromium team to piggyback on a half-baked packaging mechanism, instead of simply distributing .deb packages (like the official Chrome). Thankfully there are plenty of fixes available. Here's one of them [1]: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:saiarcot895/chromium-beta sudo apt update sudo apt install chromium-browser [1] https://launchpad.net/~saiarcot895/+archive/ubuntu/chromium-beta https://launchpad.net/~saiarcot895/+archive/ubuntu/chromium-...
• GekkePrutser 6y ago
  I agree.. This incessant pushing of snap, and the closed nature of the snap store are also things I hate. And that practice with chromium is aim to Microsoft resetting edge as default browser every update. And it is indeed wasteful. I'm sure they'll eventually abandon snap just like they did with all their other attempts at introducing their own stamp on Linux (like upstart, mir). Just hope it'll be soon.
• nickthemagicman 6y ago
  Counter to the current thoughts. I love Ubuntu and haven't had any problems with Snaps via the software center in Ubuntu. I use apt at the command line so I may not be getting the brunt of snaps problems. But using Sublime, Chromium, Spotify, Intellij, has been pretty flawless for me so far. Maybe I'm not a snap power user. Ubuntu desktop is wonderful. Not as good as Mac imo, but infinitely better than Windows. Just wanted to stick up for Ubuntu a little. I think it's great there's finally an open source Desktop OS that is as nice to use as the big two and I hope they continue their great work.
• solvorn 6y ago
  It's a "I can remove it but instead I'll just switch distros" episode.
• jsilence 6y ago
  Keep the Ubuntu apt package telemetry activated and uninstall Snap. Vote with the uninstall.
  • timbit42 6y ago
    Or vote by leaving for Linux Mint or Debian.
    • jsilence 6y ago
      They won't be able to measure this.
• amelius 6y ago
  Sadly some vendors of computer hardware have based their offerings on Ubuntu. For example, NVidia's Jetson platform is based entirely on Ubuntu 18. You can't run it with other Linux distributions (or you end up with broken stuff left and right). Therefore, vendors, please (!) build your products around kernel drivers, not around Linux distributions.
• hddherman 6y ago
  The handling of the 20.04 release was enough for me to switch my work machine to Fedora 32. I had been running it on my personal laptop previously, so I already knew what using it was like. Haven't looked back since.
• ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  Can someone offer a good alternative to Ubuntu for a home server? I tried Debian but was disappointed with the “latest” versions of software I received on stable. I do like the apt system and systemd and other features of the latest Ubuntu, so something that doesn’t fall too far from that tree would be ideal. Any suggestions for alternatives?
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • timbit42 6y ago
    If you don't want a stable server, use testing.
    • ed25519FUUU 6y ago
      How stable is testing? I want a stable build with relatively recent packages. I don’t think they’re exclusive.
• mikorym 6y ago
  If I may dare stereotype, I think that maybe OP is approaching this from the perspective that operating systems such as macOS or Windows have instilled in us. I use Ubuntu 20.04 just as I have used 18.04 and 16.04, and the presence or absence of snap doesn't alter the experience for me. GNU/Linux based operating systems will always have a sort of idiosyncrasy inherent to it that stems from the fact that it's really isn't built on fads, and fads are always what would detract from it. Hence, Snap should be used by those who like it, and history will tell us whether it were a fad or not. I think Ubuntu in general tries to appeal to more of the masses and would try to use things to draw people to it. Nothing wrong with that; you could always use Arch. But please don't regard a feature that really isn't forced on you by GNU/Linux in general as a reason to, eh, be snapped off it. I use Xubuntu 20.04 and have used Snap here and there and for the most part I couldn't be bothered by whether it works well or not. I do think the topic of whether Snap makes sense, whether it's too slow, etc., is a valid topic to discuss, but I don't see how it should be an argument for or against Ubuntu. In any case, being for or against something, when really it's only your own business whether you use it or not, does always have a sort of political tinge reminiscent of the aforementioned proprietary operating systems.
  • LucidLynx 6y ago
    I don't know why but Ubuntu (and Canonical) have always been the black-sheep of the FOSS "community"... I am 100% agree with you. Also, people complain on other OS that they can't remove or replace an existing software... Here, they can. But they prefer to move to another distro just because of this. I don't understand this world anymore... :(
    • mixmastamyk 6y ago
      The problem is their engineering is not very good. Not horrible, but just not great either. And they almost never respond to criticism, so canonical projects are unable to improve significantly, post debut. This is ultimately why their projects are doomed to a 95% failure rate.
• franciscop 6y ago
  IMHO this was the wrong problem to focus on (from a user perspective) for Canonical. The latest version is a mutant UI; you never know where the "Confirm" button in any window will be, some times is on the top-right, some times on the bottom right, and sometimes somewhere random. And like that for all of the OS UI buttons. Even the toolbar apps I was using broke. The last (LTS) great UI experience and where I think Ubuntu peaked was 16.04, but of course it's not practical to keep running that forever. I've since moved to using a mac last year and it's been okay. I'd love to go back to Ubuntu, but not to the thing it has become. Maybe I try another Linux distro, but I also want something stable.
  • sergeykish 6y ago
    Funny how arbitrary peaks are, for me it was 6.06 — LiveCD, Gnome 2, awesome orange-brown theme and no PulseAudio.
• linuxhansl 6y ago
  That's why I'll stick with Fedora. It's "pure", modern, and I really like the KDE spin. The non-pure stuff - when needed - is available through rpmfusion (the non free repo). Sure, I'm kind of a "beta tester" for RedHat Linux, but on the flip side there's nothing commercial in it.
• angry_octet 6y ago
  In the face of advances in security and usability brought about under iOS/Android/MacOS and yes, Windows S, these complaints are frankly ridiculous. The days of running applications without confinement, that run with the full permissions of the user, are gone. Ubuntu might have been able to make this a smoother process, but they lack the literal BILLIONS of dollars that has been spent achieving that on other operating systems. If you want to be an old greybeard, use apt or build it from source.
  • throwawayishai 6y ago
    Most snaps and flatpaks run with full home access. snaps only provide sandboxing when run with the Ubuntu AppArmor policy. snaps offer zero security without special configuration on other distros. Sandboxing desktop applications on Linux won't happen until distros start shipping strict SELinux policies that properly confine programs like Android does. Along with flatpak/systemd taking allowlisting seriously combined with stricter seccomp filters. Please if you maintain any packages with systemd units go read this right now and harden them, it should only take a few minutes: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.exec.html#Sandboxing https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.exe... Verify them using 'systemd-analyze security $unit'.
  • mixmastamyk 6y ago
    > but they lack the literal BILLIONS of dollars that has been spent achieving that on other operating systems. They could have just stepped aside and used one of the alternatives—priceless. Not to mention it doesn't cost billions to develop a read-only chroot archive, the building blocks are available to combine. Just have to have the humility to choose the most elegant design, which already exist.
    • angry_octet 6y ago
      Just use the Red Hat tool chain for everything? How does that end up? Subject to the whims of a few guys. Red Hat itself is better from having to compete. The use of 'just a chroot' thinking brings all the problems and none of the gains.
• sunstone 6y ago
  I thought 20.04 would be the version where I went back to Ubuntu from Mint. Then along came the Snap stuff and, looks like I'll be keeping Mint for a while longer.
• LucidLynx 6y ago
  So, people are complaining that distributions they can modify include something that they can remove and replace by another thing like Flatpak... Interesting...
  • deleted 6y ago
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• coldtea 6y ago
  >Users wanting to install Flatpak apps need to revert to using the .deb version. It’s not an ideal solution when previous Ubuntu Software releases could handle all three formats. In all, the latest Ubuntu Software is a step back. Supporting fewer competing formats (and eventuallu just one) sounds like progress to me... >And that’s another place where snaps don’t shine. They are slow. I hate that Chromium’s snap takes more than 10 seconds to load on cold boot on a freaking SSD, whereas .deb and Flatpak apps load in 1-2 seconds. Snaps are simply not fast enough to be default anything yet. That said, this sucks. How can this be? I though snap was just some packaging wrapper format (so one wouldn't expect any difference in loading time) -- is it more like ELF instead? Or is it some extra overhead like non-shared libs?
  • detaro 6y ago
    I'm sure Ubuntu considers it progress when they can push more people to use their pet project and it's app store nobody can self-host and give less room to its competitor. But is it progress for the users, for whom access to software not available as Snap and not in repos became harder? The developers who hoped supporting one of the competing formats would be enough to reach most users, and picked for Flatpak for any number of reasons?
    • coldtea 6y ago
      >I'm sure Ubuntu considers it progress when they can push more people to use their pet project and it's app store nobody can self-host and give less room to its competitor. But is it progress for the users, for whom access to software not available as Snap and not in repos became harder? The progress being having a single standard -- then all the software will be available for that. Mixing and matching 2-3 different package/distribution formats to get all of your software because some is available in one and not the other is not ideal, and doesn't lead to a consistent sytem.
      • detaro 6y ago
        If there's anything approaching consensus about the "single standard" then maybe, but to me it seems like a good chunk of the ecosystem right now wants Canonicals idea of that to fail, at least in its current form, and instead of attempting to fix the problems and trying to make the user experience more consistent across the different options they try to force it.
• ornel 6y ago
  Forced automatic updates are a dealbreaker for me as I need an OS to run on a slow satellite connection on a ship with 35 people. I need total control over updates. I guess Ubuntu is designed for an idealised sort of user that does not need total control, and that's OK, no Ubuntu for me
• rcarmo 6y ago
  I honestly don't see the issue here. Snaps may not be perfect, but they are _optional_. I use them to install Blender and Godot on my Elementary laptop because it's simpler to do so than other ways, and (even the isolation is slightly broken in Blender's case, which requires a legacy flag), it is _super convenient_. But, again, why complain about an optional thing that benefits many people?
  • ayush--s 6y ago
    It's not optional for all software. Eg: Authy only publishes their electron based app through snap
    • johnisgood 6y ago
      Quite a few software does that. I just avoid them at all costs, and boycott them. People who keep saying snaps are optional, and so forth are ignoring the bigger picture here. You know, I am just going to use a Linux distribution with saner defaults, where I do not have to disable Snap to begin with.
• bfrog 6y ago
  Yep, all debian and cent now, no more snap craziness for me
• siscia 6y ago
  Kinda hijacking the conversation, but I discovered a great FUSE filesystem to distribute software over the network. It allows to have HUGE amount of software available with the trade-off that the files you are asking for are not in cache, it is slow to retrieve them (need to retrieve each one of HTTP.) Would people be interested in such filesystem distributed in the wild? The /bin directory would be put at the end of your $PATH, as a fallback, you got the local version, great use the fast one from your SSD, you don't have that particular software, good, wait a tiny bit and get it over the network if you didn't store it in cache before. I would find it useful for development tools like compilers or interpreters, that it is always quite a mess to install locally.
  • ColanR 6y ago
    Better to make your question an Ask HN, or a blog post describing whatever it is you're talking about and post that on here.
• vffhfhf 6y ago
  I actually like snap. At the end of the day users like me matter. I cannot find 1 decent pomodrone app for linux. I now have 2 of those from snap store. I could not get that mycroft ai app to run for some reason. One in snap actually works. Ya the startup time is noticeable but they work. For intermediate like me and noob users its awesome. Edit: also purple task is good to do list maker. So at the end of the day what ever attracts developer to make cool little app is a win for me.
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    It's nice to have as option, but I think the issue is that software that becomes a snap doesn't stay a normal package anymore.
• fizixer 6y ago
  If you're a tiling wm user, you might want to try out regolith linux. It's a i3wm desktop variant of Ubuntu (latest release based on 20.04 LTS) like Pop!_os, and I just checked, I don't have 'snap' installed.
• stakkur 6y ago
  You can remove existing snaps and disable snaps, because Linux. It's fairly quick and easy: https://www.kevin-custer.com/blog/disabling-snaps-in-ubuntu-20-04/ https://www.kevin-custer.com/blog/disabling-snaps-in-ubuntu-...
  • deleted 6y ago
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• mahgnous 6y ago
  Same, back to Debian because of it.
• heavyset_go 6y ago
  I'm not a fan of Snap, in fact I've complained about it on HN before, but it really isn't that big of a deal. It's a minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things. At least for me, it would be a spiteful decision to go to macOS of all operating systems, where system package managers don't exist, and the only viable option is a 3rd party Homebrew or Macports repository.
  • YetAnotherNick 6y ago
    It's true that builtin package manager doesn't exist for mac, but homebrew has managed to become one of the best package manager in any os.
    • heavyset_go 6y ago
      I have to disagree. Homebrew doesn't even come close to what's been available in Linux for decades. Whenever I have to use macOS I'm perpetually frustrated by the state of package management on the OS.
      • Hackbraten 6y ago
        Homebrew maintainer here. Care to elaborate? We have lots of happy users but it’s equally important for me to learn how Homebrew hurts people.
• unixhero 6y ago
  Which distro do you recommend?
• coronadisaster 6y ago
  What I hate most about snaps is that they show up when I use "df -hl" ... but I don't use Ubuntu anymore so I don't have that problem.
• mohas 6y ago
  That's a no no for Ubuntu, going back to Debian
• hendersoon 6y ago
  I'm not a snap fan either, for the reasons listed in this post-- slow starts and forced autoupdates. I do use it for LXD, where it's the only way to stay up to date.
• shultays 6y ago
  I tried Ubuntu, again, very recently and had to give up. This was like only 2-3 days of usage. And it is only the stuff I can remember now I have two monitors, but Ubuntu thought their positions were swapped. I swapped them back in settings and it looked good and I hit enter to accept "is it good" pop up. Then I noticed my mouse was on left screen while it registers the clicks on right. Took me quite a while to revert it back Firefox was really unresponsive. Was hanging at times and generally felt slower This is subjective, but its UX sucks really. I tried to install some apps, there is like 3 different application managers? None of them was pinned. Can't even install 7z via application managers. There is one application but it didn't work for me. Had to use console. Can't install unrar by default unless you add some repositories. I guess since it is not free. It is even harder for codes since they are just binaries I think? And they come with a package that contains a lot of other stuff that includes chromium? Wth Tried to figure out what my local ip is, couldn't find it on any user interface. Opened console typed "ifconfig" and it is not there now. I had to google which command it was It decided to do some random updates in the background and stuck I think. It had apt-get lock, which was blocking me to install applications manually -- In my opinion Ubuntu Desktop is not improving, at least for average Joe (and I am a bit above that). The opposite really.
• guest4567890 6y ago
  - Snap cannot be avoided in Ubuntu. Key parts of UI are or will be delivered as snaps. - Snap uses SquashFS, that is optimized for small size, not fast extract speed. - Snap share some functionality via other core snaps, but overall files can be repeated on each snap and include files to run in all platforms, resulting in more space needed in device. - The location where snaps are and key folder locations cannot be changed by user. - Snap keeps a unique machine id and unique per snap cookies that are used to collect statistics and identify same instance, even after remove and reinstall of the snap. User has not control over that. - Snap store collects geo-location data based on IP and install and usage information based on machine id and cookie ids. - Snap uses loop devices, a lot of them (all revisions are mounted). UI tools are being patched to hide them, but gnu tools such as df look messy. - Snap daemon and server are closed source. - Currently old revisions are not removed. - Manual remove does not remove snapshots and config unless --purge is used. - Cache and config folders as seen by a snap application cannot be changed or pointed to other locations. - Users can connect or disconnect plugs that are already defined in a snap, but cannot add new ones. - Snap updates cannot be avoided. - System misleads users by making it confusing to know what is deb and what is snap. - Many snaps do not really work. They expect something that is different in my machine. I tried rclone snap, ended up installing it manually. - Many snaps have old versions of software, people did them once to have them apper in store and do not maintain them anymore. Users will be forced to leave away security of deb packages in official repos, and install things manually on their own. - Some snaps due to limitations have limitations in functionality. For example, gimp snap cannot start xsane anymore. - I have no doubt that snaps are checked by Ubuntu team for security, but as user I have no way to check that and there are many snaps that have both :home and :network interfaces enabled, although :network is not needed. Especially snaps from "Snapcrafters" are somehow liberal on plugs combinations they allow. - As other have notes, snapcraft.io is hard to use to find things. - The only winner I think of Chromium browser being a snap is Google. We are forced to install Google Chrome directly as that is the easiest alternative that works. Ubuntu could better decided not provide it than make it a snap. - I tried Chromium snap and my Gnome mouse cursor does not work there. I read in some Ubuntu snap forum entry the fixing that (using user themes) is against the idea of snap running same in all systems. I do not care about that, I only care they respect my UI theme. - The snap sandbox is not a complete sandbox. Snaps still see XWindow data, and other variables and memory. The main security behind snaps does not come from the sandbox, but from review of Ubuntu security team. A non-transparent process done by few people. - These being said, if I want to run or test some app quickly and not mess the system, snap is a choice, but forcing it over users without having a choice, will increase the risks uses have to take to figure out alternative installs for all cases where snaps do not work for the user needs.
• Animats 6y ago
  Yes. I'm staying with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS for now. Maybe Mint next.
• jug 6y ago
  I’m still waiting to experience the issues snaps are even trying to solve. It’s like having a worse experience for reasons I myself don’t even see. My issues with snaps are part the ugly and clearly “non-native” startup time, and part that many lack in system integration. For example sometimes their font rendering is uglier or the open file dialogs look bad or present me with the confusing “snap worldview”. Bah. Auto updating? Who cares. Package managers makes it super easy to keep systems fresh. I heard many distros even do it themselves or come with one click interfaces for it...
• skee0083 6y ago
  Linux is only useful if your time has no value. I use it on my server but that's about it. Couldn't use it on the desktop. it's just as bad now as it was back in 2007 when i first tried it. in fact i think it's actually gotten worse in some aspects. it' definitely slower and more bloated now for sure.
• fractalf 6y ago
  Ubuntu has gone way to far in this. Reminds me of Microsoft in the 90s. It's really really sad and totally unbelievable. Why on earth would they make such terrible choises, I just don't get it. Linux Mint is an awesome alternative, recommended!
  • Medicalidiot 6y ago
    I went from Ubuntu to Fedora because of the recent decisions made by the devs and the hard push of Snaps. I use Chromium every once in awhile and am amazed at how long it takes for it to start up; it's almost instantly on every other distro.
• FpUser 6y ago
  I have Ubuntu 20.04 LTS installed on WLS2 (I've added and using desktop/GUI layer as well) but the first thing I've done after installing original image from MS is to wipe out any trace of Snap after disabling it. All nice and rosy but yeah as I am not sure what other shenanigan Ubuntu will come up with in the future I'll be switching to some other distro. I do not trust Canonical after such f..up unless they will openly revert the decision and get rid of that dreaded Snap themselves.
• ablekh 6y ago
  Snap can be disabled in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. See the following blog post: https://www.kevin-custer.com/blog/disabling-snaps-in-ubuntu-20-04 https://www.kevin-custer.com/blog/disabling-snaps-in-ubuntu-... (discovered this before seeing relevant comment by @guiambros on the 2nd page :-). Relevant HN discussion at the time can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22972661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22972661.
• yycom 6y ago
  Has Canonical still said nothing about this? The conclusion is inescapable: they do not care. And that is why we should all find alternatives.
• ausjke 6y ago
  I just apt remove --purge snap and life is good
• julianlam 6y ago
  > Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it. I have switched to macOS as my daily driver, for many other reasons. I don’t have the time to keep fixing things on Linux and be constantly finding ways to work around standard OS features that should otherwise just be available and work. Funny, that's exactly what I thought when I tried a MacBook for the first time. Everything just seemed off about it and I spent 11 months trying to tweak it until it was just right, but never got to that point. 30 minutes on Pop!_OS and I'm good to go.
• afrojack123 6y ago
  Canonical does not work for free. Open source has turned into a marketing term. Canonical made Amazon a default install on Ubuntu and now they are trying to turn the Snap store into something like the Apple or Android store.
• johnisgood 6y ago
  Snap is just goddamn horrible! It goes against the FOSS philosophy in every way imaginable, seriously.
• marsdepinski 6y ago
  Stop bitching and moaning and compile it yourself. ./configure && make is pretty easy and pretty much the way it was done up until mid 2000s
• hn17 6y ago
  It seems that current LTS relase needs more bug and glitches fixing, quality is worse than before :-( It's not just snaps, also software center have it's problems (crashing, glitches/lags in listing and installing apps, driver detection problems). I used Ubuntu for many years, it's normal that some relases are more polished that other. Overally great OS and it's "free". Let's hope they will fix it. I used error reporting functionality and also donated to Ubuntu.
• Yuioup 6y ago
  Here is the same article written 4 months ago: https://nsonews.com/ubuntu-20-04-lts-snap-obsession-has-snapped-me-off-of-it/ https://nsonews.com/ubuntu-20-04-lts-snap-obsession-has-snap... Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24383276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24383276 https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/gc7p1t/ubuntu_2004_lts_snap_obsession_has_snapped_me_off/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/gc7p1t/ubuntu_2004_l...
• 29athrowaway 6y ago
  Users and groups are not enough to secure Linux, especially on a desktop environment. Snaps have a permissions system backed by AppArmor and Seccomp that confines the snap to a sandbox with limited privileges based on a security profile. You can read about it here: - https://core.docs.ubuntu.com/en/guides/intro/security#heading--permissions https://core.docs.ubuntu.com/en/guides/intro/security#headin... - https://snapcraft.io/docs/interface-management https://snapcraft.io/docs/interface-management Flatpak does have a sandbox but in practice, many flatpaks do not use it securely. You can read about it here: https://flatkill.org/ https://flatkill.org/ AppImage does not seem that security is one of its goals. So, for the time being I'll keep using snaps. They're a great idea :) So, tl;dr: Snaps are not only about packaging. They confine software to a sandbox with limited privileges.
• whatsmyusername 6y ago
  I just wipe snapd on the 2nd pass of ansible runs and call it a day.