4 ms·

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 t

by 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.
- kd913 6y ago
  >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. You missed the third/fource/fifth choice provided by both Canonical, RedHat and Mozilla who has decided to offer Firefox/Thunderbird as a snap/flatpak. A version that is actually confined and restricted with apparmor/mounted namespaces/seccompf filters. >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. No it's only for chromium, everything else will obey and use the package manager if requested. >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. They stated clearly why they moved it to snap. Chromium is a popular common browser which people use for banking. They can't just leave people to use the old chromium browser. Their option was to forcefully remove chromium or move people to the snap. >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. Yea and they heard the same nonsense from people talking about launchpad years ago. They spent a considerable amount of engineering effort to open source it and nobody else was running the infrastructure because it's suprisingly complex and expensive to run. They received no PRs whatsoever for considerable engineering cost and effort. Snap is dependent on Canonical infra, and considering how Mint, POP_OS and others all use their infra. Nobody else will be running their infra. They also have experience from PPAs where the most common PPA being used on offer was a abandoned oracle java package that was provided by some random 3rd party. That PPA has root access to hundreds of thousands of machines and can upload any random package and have it execute. Does that sound like sensible security policy at all? >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. This is the root of the problem. Canonical has done a lot for the FOSS community. GNU desktop linux would be way behind without them and yea I agree they have some missteps. They are still a lot better than the majority of the community, majority of companies out there and have done a lot to support the FOSS community. They made one of the most usable distros out there and is still one of the most popular Linux OSes out there. People just love to hate them because they don't follow their ideal 'perfect' FOSS company. I'm glad snap exists, I'm glad competition exists and I hope they continue to succeed.

by kd913 6y ago

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.

kd913 6y ago
>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. You missed the third/fource/fifth choice provided by both Canonical, RedHat and Mozilla who has decided to offer Firefox/Thunderbird as a snap/flatpak. A version that is actually confined and restricted with apparmor/mounted namespaces/seccompf filters. >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. No it's only for chromium, everything else will obey and use the package manager if requested. >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. They stated clearly why they moved it to snap. Chromium is a popular common browser which people use for banking. They can't just leave people to use the old chromium browser. Their option was to forcefully remove chromium or move people to the snap. >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. Yea and they heard the same nonsense from people talking about launchpad years ago. They spent a considerable amount of engineering effort to open source it and nobody else was running the infrastructure because it's suprisingly complex and expensive to run. They received no PRs whatsoever for considerable engineering cost and effort. Snap is dependent on Canonical infra, and considering how Mint, POP_OS and others all use their infra. Nobody else will be running their infra. They also have experience from PPAs where the most common PPA being used on offer was a abandoned oracle java package that was provided by some random 3rd party. That PPA has root access to hundreds of thousands of machines and can upload any random package and have it execute. Does that sound like sensible security policy at all? >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. This is the root of the problem. Canonical has done a lot for the FOSS community. GNU desktop linux would be way behind without them and yea I agree they have some missteps. They are still a lot better than the majority of the community, majority of companies out there and have done a lot to support the FOSS community. They made one of the most usable distros out there and is still one of the most popular Linux OSes out there. People just love to hate them because they don't follow their ideal 'perfect' FOSS company. I'm glad snap exists, I'm glad competition exists and I hope they continue to succeed.