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I was actually one of the people that thought snaps and flatpaks are the future of Linux desktop computing, because they isolate software and they make distribu
by dxuh 4y ago
I was actually one of the people that thought snaps and flatpaks are the future of Linux desktop computing, because they isolate software and they make distribution much easier. But since Ubuntu 22 switched to the Firefox snap I am not sure if I think that anymore. I have been using Ubuntu many years ago (when the version was still in single digits), then didn't use it for a while and then started using it again with the release of Ubuntu 18. Since I started using it again I have been recommending it to everyone every chance I got, but I think it's not worth anyone's time anymore. After updating to Ubuntu 22, almost everything broke. When I pressed the super button to "zoom out" and see all my windows and then clicked on a window to switch to it, about a third of the time the screen turned grey, the whole shell crashed and I had to wait a few seconds for it to come back. Another third of the time it just did nothing. When I close Nautilus (the file browser) it crashes about half of the time (and still does to this day). In Firefox dragging tabs to my bookmark folders did not work if you drag the tab to the bookmark bar of the same window. You had to drag it to another window's bookmark bar (took me a while to figure that out too). It still happens sometimes. The right-click menu was themed incorrectly (had a different color than anything else). But the worst thing were the downloads. You could not download to any other folder but ~/Downloads. Not even subfolders! And If you did download to a subfolder after a few seconds it would slow down the whole application to an absolute crawl, where scrolling was non-interactive and switching tabs took seconds. If you then abort the download and download with Chromium instead (also a snap), Firefox freezes completely until the download is finished in Chromium, after which Firefox unfreezes. What kind of sandboxing is that? And yes, this was reproducible. I cannot even imagine the kind stuff they are building there and I have no trust in it anymore. I realize I got hit unusually hard, but this is supposed to be an LTS release and it's a total mess. Now that many of the problems have been fixed, what's left is also an OS I do not enjoy anymore. Firefox is nagging me that it needs to be updated all the time. Because when I close Firefox and shutdown my computer for the day, I always forget to run "snap refresh" after closing Firefox. It doesn't update it before you start it again or after you have closed it, but if you dare run it again, without having updated it, it will complain with a Desktop notification. It's so, so bad. Also I run "snap update" every time, before I need to check the help text again to see that it is "refresh". Snap is probably the only program I have ever encountered that calls updating "refresh"ing.
Also Ubuntu is now telling me constantly that I need to "restart and update your computer" IN THIS ORDER. Now I need to reboot every couple of days to install updates. In the YEARS before, I just got a popup where I could press "update", while the system was running and restart whenever I felt like it. Are we Windows now? On my Laptop I already switched to PopOS (I won't even try to interpunctuate that silly name correctly) and if I have the time and can risk wasting a few days, I will upgrade my desktop machine to PopOS too.