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I’ve also been annoyed by this. I don’t have it handy but I did find the ticket where their conversation to implement this first happened. I guess before it wou

I’ve also been annoyed by this. I don’t have it handy but I did find the ticket where their conversation to implement this first happened. I guess before it would just update without notifying the user. The idea in that conversation was, at least what I took away from it, that the user gets the notification and now knows at the end of the day they should close the app and in the morning it’ll be updated! Seems fine on paper. But the messaging in the notification doesn’t tell me that at all. And it turns out despite all the nagging I always forget to close things before I step away. I hate the execution of this feature. So much. All the nagging. All the confusing messaging. On top of it all, I don’t feel like snap gives me any qol improvements in exchange.

masklinn 4y ago
Not only that, but I stopped leaving computers on years ago. And couldn’t do that if I wanted to since it’s a laptop I’m putting away in a bag. The thing’s going to sleep until next work day.
- jakewins 4y ago
  Yeah this thread has explained to me why my Firefox perennially has a notification saying it will update.. I keep that laptop around the living room, always suspended if not used, all apps always running. If the notification gave me a “update now!” button I would click it
0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
What’s most frustrating is that snap knows the entire state of the world! They know when the application is started and closed. Could download the update at anytime and upon closing the old application, link to the update and delete the old version.
- JamesSwift 4y ago
  Which is basically how web workers work. Download silently then either use the new one on restart, or add some app level code to ask the user if they want to take the update now. At which point its a minimal install process since most of the work has been done already.
- ilyt 4y ago
  Snap format is just a single compressed file. They could literally just replace it, remove the old one and due the way of which Linux filesystems work, any new call to app will run the new one, but the old one would use the old file. They could do it basically seamlessly, with maybe notification only if you keep app running for days. Hell, that's how package manager does updates, just remove old libraries and put a new one in place, old programs will use the old one till restart, and when last filedescriptor closes it will be unlinked from filesystem. It sometimes can cause problems in "normal" apps but fact snap is just a single file removes pretty much all drawbacks of that. It's not just bad decisions but incompetence on top of that
  - Conan_Kudo 4y ago
    Snaps don't actually work that way. Snaps are squashfs images, which imposes the contract of requiring to unmount the old image before mounting the new one. When files are in use, you can't easily unmount. (Yes, you can use a lazy unmount, but bad things happen on the system with those, so it's not a good idea to rely on it!) I think you're thinking of Flatpaks, which are basically hardlink/reflink farms with symlinks used to control the pointers to the current version (OSTree).

masklinn 4y ago

Not only that, but I stopped leaving computers on years ago. And couldn’t do that if I wanted to since it’s a laptop I’m putting away in a bag. The thing’s going to sleep until next work day.

jakewins 4y ago
Yeah this thread has explained to me why my Firefox perennially has a notification saying it will update.. I keep that laptop around the living room, always suspended if not used, all apps always running. If the notification gave me a “update now!” button I would click it

0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago

What’s most frustrating is that snap knows the entire state of the world! They know when the application is started and closed. Could download the update at anytime and upon closing the old application, link to the update and delete the old version.

JamesSwift 4y ago
Which is basically how web workers work. Download silently then either use the new one on restart, or add some app level code to ask the user if they want to take the update now. At which point its a minimal install process since most of the work has been done already.
ilyt 4y ago
Snap format is just a single compressed file. They could literally just replace it, remove the old one and due the way of which Linux filesystems work, any new call to app will run the new one, but the old one would use the old file. They could do it basically seamlessly, with maybe notification only if you keep app running for days. Hell, that's how package manager does updates, just remove old libraries and put a new one in place, old programs will use the old one till restart, and when last filedescriptor closes it will be unlinked from filesystem. It sometimes can cause problems in "normal" apps but fact snap is just a single file removes pretty much all drawbacks of that. It's not just bad decisions but incompetence on top of that
- Conan_Kudo 4y ago
  Snaps don't actually work that way. Snaps are squashfs images, which imposes the contract of requiring to unmount the old image before mounting the new one. When files are in use, you can't easily unmount. (Yes, you can use a lazy unmount, but bad things happen on the system with those, so it's not a good idea to rely on it!) I think you're thinking of Flatpaks, which are basically hardlink/reflink farms with symlinks used to control the pointers to the current version (OSTree).