6 ms·

Are you kidding me? Thunderbird and Firefox are perfect candidates for snap. Before with Thunderbird, the only packaged version of thunderbird was an extremel

by kd913 6y ago

Are you kidding me? Thunderbird and Firefox are perfect candidates for snap. Before with Thunderbird, the only packaged version of thunderbird was an extremely old version released. Even now on 18.04 the package version of thunderbird is version 68. To a certain degree the same nonsense happens with Firefox. The version of Firefox provided by apt lags behind for security releases. In contrast, the snap version is now released almost the same day for ubuntu 16.04, 18.04, 20.04 and 20.10. I'm glad to be using snaps and Ubuntu. Finally I can now get an easy installation for getting the latest version of intellij, vscode, firefox, thunderbird with no additional repos or faffle.

mixmastamyk 6y ago
That's actually good because they broke a few things in the latest Thunderbirds. I also prefer a faster startup.
- kd913 6y ago
  Then fine, run sudo snap revert to go back to a hopefully older stable build/revision. Certainly a better as an option than going back to version 68. Also I don't really care about startups when the difference is on the order of 1-5 seconds. It is not the dominant factor in my boot times. The slowest aspect for me is still typing passwords. Services which are waiting for online for network interface also take longer.
  - inetknght 6y ago
    > Then fine, run sudo snap revert No. The solution shouldn't be on users to learn another package management system beyond what the OS already provides.
    - kd913 6y ago
      It's not beyond what the OS provides? Snap is a part of ubuntu? The CLI interface for snap I find is a lot more intuitive than flatpak. Also what rights do you have to become the UX arbiter here?
      - inetknght 6y ago
        The OS provides `apt-get`. Learning more than `apt-get` is and should be completely unnecessary and a bad choice of Ubuntu's Canonical. > Also what rights do you have to become the UX arbiter here? I am a user. So user experience is certainly arbitrary.
  - mixmastamyk 6y ago
    68 is the last non-broken version.
Darmody 6y ago
How's that an argument? If they are stuck with Thunderbird 68 is because they don't want to update it. Same thing can happen with snap. If they don't work on it, you won't have the latest version.
- kd913 6y ago
  The amount of development resources and effort needed to build publish and release the snap is a lot less than the apt. No need to interact with bzr, much easier to update in the snap store compared with repos. Snaps are built against one version, they easily integrate into CI pipelines (unlike launchpad/bzr) and you don't need to worry about things like outdated compiler versions (for releases on 18.04/16.04/14.04). I know because I helped with the CI builds of Firefox for snap.
  - Darmody 6y ago
    But again, bzr and launchpad are their own tools. If they are bad it's not an argument for snap. Other distros have their packages updated very quickly without snap.
    - kd913 6y ago
      > But again, bzr and launchpad are their own tools. If they are bad it's not an argument for snap. This logic makes no sense whatsoever. If the previous tools are cumbersome and bad, and Canonical releases a new mechanism that is easier to develop/use/release. How the hell is that not an argument for the new mechanism? What is this logic? Nevermind that this new process is already integrated into several CI pipelines at Microsoft, VLC, Mozilla, Google, Amazon, JetBrains, KDE and Spotify.
bayindirh 6y ago
> Before with Thunderbird, the only packaged version of thunderbird was an extremely old version released. Even now on 18.04 the package version of thunderbird is version 68. 18.04 is a LTS release and it only contains ESR releases of Firefox and Thunderbird. Like Debian Stable. Even Debian has Firefox 82 and Thunderbird 78 nowadays. They're intentionally kept at the unstable channel because they're updated a lot. Stable gets the ESR releases but, unstable gets the latest releases in 48 hours max. > The version of Firefox provided by apt lags behind for security releases. Firefox has a Debian Exception which allows Debian to merge its well-tested security patches & hardening, and still publish it as Firefox with the original version number. This causes the 24-48 hour delays unless a patch breaks something. Even if it breaks something, you get the latest version at most a week later. I won't even argue about the harms/disadvantages of Snaps and the forcing of them upon users by Canonical... This comment is submitted with Firefox 82.0.2-1 obtained via official Debian repositories.
- kd913 6y ago
  Yea but now those developers who are stuck on 18.04 (for IT reasons) can actually run/use the latest stable userland applications without having to break from the stability provided by the older OS? How is that bad? I don't want to be stuck on version 68 of Firefox/Thunderbird just like I wouldn't want to be using Chromium from 10 versions ago. >I won't even argue about the harms/disadvantages of Snaps and the forcing of them upon users by Canonical... Canonical only forced one snap and that was chromium... Everything else is still maintained as an apt package if required. They put a pretty well explained reasoning as to why it was forced. Namely that it was impossible to maintain the chromium package for 14.04 and older releases because they couldn't backport the compiler. Hence the option available to them was to remove the package or keep people supported using snap. Not to mention that Chromium is still a Universe program and not officially supported at all. They didn't want to fork over the additional maintenance overhead which I am not gonna complain about.
  - bayindirh 6y ago
    Firefox and Thunderbird are not wild applications in terms of dependencies. They're happy to work with whatever libraries you have on the system. I'm not sure Firefox 82 requires significantly newer versions of the libraries required by Firefox 68. It's same for Thunderbird. In that case you have two choices. You can either use a PPA or just download the .tar.gz release and expand to a folder under your home folder. I did the second one a lot. In our system room we have a computer which runs CentOS 6 and used for mundane tasks. When I have to work there and have some extra time, I just get the latest Firefox release and untar under my home folder, and continue using that. I'll have to go there tomorrow and will try Firefox 82 just for fun. Canonical pushes its users a lot and, I always hear the same thing: "It's just one package", It's well explained. No, just no. When I apt-get something, I expect an apt package. Not a silent install of snapd and and a snap, and a lot of under the hood tweaking to hide what they're doing. If it's a universe package and it is not supported at all, why they're declaring it as a play pen and doing their testing on that? It's not supported, OK but, it's not declared for testing. The problem with Snap is not the idea. It's centralization, it's trying to dominate the space, it's the silent pushing-forward and portraying it as the only way. No, it's not. A lot of companies are pushing a lot of ideas because they like it internally and, they push it harder when they experience pressure because, they see themselves the only people with the right opinions and it benefits them to dominate the space. I already don't like Canonical because of a lot of things but, they're becoming the thing they wanted to dethrone. The bugzilla's #1 bug was Microsoft's domination and they're just trying to their tactics and, integrating to anything they were against, because money. With their every action, I move one step further away from them.

by kd913 6y ago

mixmastamyk 6y ago

That's actually good because they broke a few things in the latest Thunderbirds. I also prefer a faster startup.

kd913 6y ago
Then fine, run sudo snap revert to go back to a hopefully older stable build/revision. Certainly a better as an option than going back to version 68. Also I don't really care about startups when the difference is on the order of 1-5 seconds. It is not the dominant factor in my boot times. The slowest aspect for me is still typing passwords. Services which are waiting for online for network interface also take longer.
- inetknght 6y ago
  > Then fine, run sudo snap revert No. The solution shouldn't be on users to learn another package management system beyond what the OS already provides.
  - kd913 6y ago
    It's not beyond what the OS provides? Snap is a part of ubuntu? The CLI interface for snap I find is a lot more intuitive than flatpak. Also what rights do you have to become the UX arbiter here?
    - inetknght 6y ago
      The OS provides `apt-get`. Learning more than `apt-get` is and should be completely unnecessary and a bad choice of Ubuntu's Canonical. > Also what rights do you have to become the UX arbiter here? I am a user. So user experience is certainly arbitrary.
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  68 is the last non-broken version.

Darmody 6y ago

How's that an argument? If they are stuck with Thunderbird 68 is because they don't want to update it. Same thing can happen with snap. If they don't work on it, you won't have the latest version.

kd913 6y ago
The amount of development resources and effort needed to build publish and release the snap is a lot less than the apt. No need to interact with bzr, much easier to update in the snap store compared with repos. Snaps are built against one version, they easily integrate into CI pipelines (unlike launchpad/bzr) and you don't need to worry about things like outdated compiler versions (for releases on 18.04/16.04/14.04). I know because I helped with the CI builds of Firefox for snap.
- Darmody 6y ago
  But again, bzr and launchpad are their own tools. If they are bad it's not an argument for snap. Other distros have their packages updated very quickly without snap.
  - kd913 6y ago
    > But again, bzr and launchpad are their own tools. If they are bad it's not an argument for snap. This logic makes no sense whatsoever. If the previous tools are cumbersome and bad, and Canonical releases a new mechanism that is easier to develop/use/release. How the hell is that not an argument for the new mechanism? What is this logic? Nevermind that this new process is already integrated into several CI pipelines at Microsoft, VLC, Mozilla, Google, Amazon, JetBrains, KDE and Spotify.

bayindirh 6y ago

> Before with Thunderbird, the only packaged version of thunderbird was an extremely old version released. Even now on 18.04 the package version of thunderbird is version 68. 18.04 is a LTS release and it only contains ESR releases of Firefox and Thunderbird. Like Debian Stable. Even Debian has Firefox 82 and Thunderbird 78 nowadays. They're intentionally kept at the unstable channel because they're updated a lot. Stable gets the ESR releases but, unstable gets the latest releases in 48 hours max. > The version of Firefox provided by apt lags behind for security releases. Firefox has a Debian Exception which allows Debian to merge its well-tested security patches & hardening, and still publish it as Firefox with the original version number. This causes the 24-48 hour delays unless a patch breaks something. Even if it breaks something, you get the latest version at most a week later. I won't even argue about the harms/disadvantages of Snaps and the forcing of them upon users by Canonical... This comment is submitted with Firefox 82.0.2-1 obtained via official Debian repositories.

kd913 6y ago
Yea but now those developers who are stuck on 18.04 (for IT reasons) can actually run/use the latest stable userland applications without having to break from the stability provided by the older OS? How is that bad? I don't want to be stuck on version 68 of Firefox/Thunderbird just like I wouldn't want to be using Chromium from 10 versions ago. >I won't even argue about the harms/disadvantages of Snaps and the forcing of them upon users by Canonical... Canonical only forced one snap and that was chromium... Everything else is still maintained as an apt package if required. They put a pretty well explained reasoning as to why it was forced. Namely that it was impossible to maintain the chromium package for 14.04 and older releases because they couldn't backport the compiler. Hence the option available to them was to remove the package or keep people supported using snap. Not to mention that Chromium is still a Universe program and not officially supported at all. They didn't want to fork over the additional maintenance overhead which I am not gonna complain about.
- bayindirh 6y ago
  Firefox and Thunderbird are not wild applications in terms of dependencies. They're happy to work with whatever libraries you have on the system. I'm not sure Firefox 82 requires significantly newer versions of the libraries required by Firefox 68. It's same for Thunderbird. In that case you have two choices. You can either use a PPA or just download the .tar.gz release and expand to a folder under your home folder. I did the second one a lot. In our system room we have a computer which runs CentOS 6 and used for mundane tasks. When I have to work there and have some extra time, I just get the latest Firefox release and untar under my home folder, and continue using that. I'll have to go there tomorrow and will try Firefox 82 just for fun. Canonical pushes its users a lot and, I always hear the same thing: "It's just one package", It's well explained. No, just no. When I apt-get something, I expect an apt package. Not a silent install of snapd and and a snap, and a lot of under the hood tweaking to hide what they're doing. If it's a universe package and it is not supported at all, why they're declaring it as a play pen and doing their testing on that? It's not supported, OK but, it's not declared for testing. The problem with Snap is not the idea. It's centralization, it's trying to dominate the space, it's the silent pushing-forward and portraying it as the only way. No, it's not. A lot of companies are pushing a lot of ideas because they like it internally and, they push it harder when they experience pressure because, they see themselves the only people with the right opinions and it benefits them to dominate the space. I already don't like Canonical because of a lot of things but, they're becoming the thing they wanted to dethrone. The bugzilla's #1 bug was Microsoft's domination and they're just trying to their tactics and, integrating to anything they were against, because money. With their every action, I move one step further away from them.