8 ms·

What are your concerns?

abeyer 3y ago
Personally mine are the fact that this isn't really "zero trust", but more "infinitely diffuse trust" where every user has to trust every application. None of the packaging alternatives I'm aware of seem to yet have their security story in line where they are either secure enough (without breaking most software) to not have to trust every application or provide some level of assurance themselves comparable to the debian maintainers.
JohnFen 3y ago
Oh, I have quite a few of them, from increased resource usage, proprietary aspects, through forced updating and more. The forced updating is particularly unacceptable. But, the 10,000 ft view is that they reduce the amount of control I have over my system. They offer restrictions I chafe at while giving me no benefit that I care about. I'm not going to sit here and say they shouldn't exist. That they're not to my taste doesn't mean that others who like them shouldn't have them. But they're not to my taste at all. After seeing systemd getting widely adopted (also not to my taste), if snaps (or flatpacks, although I am less allergic to those) join the party then that's just a clear indication that the Linux world and I have diverged too much and I need to move on.
- fsflover 3y ago
  > the Linux world and I have diverged too much and I need to move on I moved to Qubes OS and like it.
- WhyNotHugo 3y ago
  Alpine feels a lot like a BSD to me, and I’m very happy with it. But this bloatification is happening all over the place. Firefox is starting to have more and more dependency on flatpak’s daemons, even if you don’t use flatpak. These daemons are becoming the de facto standard for some interfaces too sadly. This also means that a lot of software is a lot less portable.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    I'm just going to move to BSD entirely, I think. I'm saddened to hear that FF has dependencies on flatpack daemons, but I'm not surprised by it. The direction Linux is going seems very clear to me, and I expect more of that sort of thing as time goes on.
    - Aerbil313 3y ago
      Meh. There’s just too much technical debt all over the place. Not even BSDs suffice from the POV of what an OS can be. A new modern OS written today with lessons taken from the past would solve the inherent pains of all existing ones. My dream is to do that. Just a dream rn tho.
- amelius 3y ago
  It's a quite powerful idea to run every package in its own container (sandbox). However, it depends on the implementation and Snap just sucks. (Note that the default Unix assumption is that no users can be trusted but all applications can be trusted, which is wrong imho. Containers provide a way out of this, but things get messy very fast.).
  - goodpoint 3y ago
    The sandbox is not going to protect users from spyware telemetries, bad security for the application itself, ads, and so on.
    - amelius 3y ago
      Yes, but right now my smartphone is more secure wrt apps than my desktop, which is odd.
      - goodpoint 3y ago
        No, you can use a security oriented distribution, plus sandbox the applications you use.
    - fsflover 3y ago
      > The sandbox is not going to protect users from ... bad security for the application itself Your other data, in other sandboxes, is protected though.
      - goodpoint 3y ago
        Sure, but that's far from enough.
        fsflover 3y ago
        This is the only truly reliable security approach: security by compartmentalization.
- rlpb 3y ago
  > The forced updating is particularly unacceptable. Snaps allow you to hold updates indefinitely now: no forced updates any more. Use "snap refresh --hold <some snap name>". See https://snapcraft.io/docs/keeping-snaps-up-to-date#heading--controlling-updates https://snapcraft.io/docs/keeping-snaps-up-to-date#heading--....
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Oh, that's good news!
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - apple4ever 3y ago
    Oh wow I missed they finally gave in and fixed that. When did that happen?
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  I haven't run a desktop linux for years so this might be completely off, but what I got from it was there will two majors paths: - you're a hardcore oriented distro, you assume most things will be built from source, follow all of your dependencies and maintain the glue for your distro. Gentoo/Slackware style。 - you value convenience and go the snaps/flatpack route. And you can still go the convenience path while building some specific apps from source, but there will be a bigger gap to bridge and it won't make sense formost applications. I get the shift, as we're already seeing it, even outside the cloud, I think it's still the best of both worlds. I compare that to how I'm running a natively compiled postgres version but a containerized mysql because it was too much of a pain to match all the dependencies.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    But there really needs to be a third path, in between the two you cite. Most Linux distros have been that third path.
srcthr 3y ago
This model destroys any reason for software to be open source. What's the point of having source code if you just run the binary provided by some party? Reminds me of the early days of the tensorflow where everyone used whatever binary package worked an no one could run anyone else's code because people kept getting stale binaries somewhere in the stack.
- jcastro 3y ago
  The packaging format doesn't change source code availability or restrictions.
  - goodpoint 3y ago
    On a practical level it's completely different.
  - eichin 3y ago
    What's the snap equivalent of "apt-get source"? Failing to find that meant for me, it was time to start purging snapd from new installs entirely (and to start fretting about ubuntu starting to be philosophically incompatible with what I want out of a system.) Fortunately even with 23.04 (server) that still seems to leave an entirely working system.
michaelt 3y ago
Snap makes it easier to distribute closed-source software like skype - but people running linux on the desktop generally have no great love of closed source software. For open source software, snap is the same software, but slower, more broken and with worse upgrades. Snap's changed the firefox update process so I now have to run 'sudo snap refresh' and wait for a download, where before I just closed and reopened it. Maybe it'll make my running application's dock icon disappear, hope you always use alt+tab instead of the dock. Snap can install ffmpeg - but I can't feed a screen recording to vaapi for compression because whoever set up the sandboxing forgot to allow that. Good luck sharing anything from, say, ~/.config/ on, say, discord - you get a silent unexplained failure, because hidden folder access is blocked by the sandbox. Installing a browser? With snap you get three copies; you can adjust refresh.retain down to only keep 2 copies - but 1 copy is out of the question. There's a reason canonical has to force snap down people's throats, and it's because nobody uses it by choice.

Personally mine are the fact that this isn't really "zero trust", but more "infinitely diffuse trust" where every user has to trust every application. None of the packaging alternatives I'm aware of seem to yet have their security story in line where they are either secure enough (without breaking most software) to not have to trust every application or provide some level of assurance themselves comparable to the debian maintainers.

JohnFen 3y ago

Oh, I have quite a few of them, from increased resource usage, proprietary aspects, through forced updating and more. The forced updating is particularly unacceptable. But, the 10,000 ft view is that they reduce the amount of control I have over my system. They offer restrictions I chafe at while giving me no benefit that I care about. I'm not going to sit here and say they shouldn't exist. That they're not to my taste doesn't mean that others who like them shouldn't have them. But they're not to my taste at all. After seeing systemd getting widely adopted (also not to my taste), if snaps (or flatpacks, although I am less allergic to those) join the party then that's just a clear indication that the Linux world and I have diverged too much and I need to move on.

fsflover 3y ago
> the Linux world and I have diverged too much and I need to move on I moved to Qubes OS and like it.
WhyNotHugo 3y ago
Alpine feels a lot like a BSD to me, and I’m very happy with it. But this bloatification is happening all over the place. Firefox is starting to have more and more dependency on flatpak’s daemons, even if you don’t use flatpak. These daemons are becoming the de facto standard for some interfaces too sadly. This also means that a lot of software is a lot less portable.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I'm just going to move to BSD entirely, I think. I'm saddened to hear that FF has dependencies on flatpack daemons, but I'm not surprised by it. The direction Linux is going seems very clear to me, and I expect more of that sort of thing as time goes on.
  - Aerbil313 3y ago
    Meh. There’s just too much technical debt all over the place. Not even BSDs suffice from the POV of what an OS can be. A new modern OS written today with lessons taken from the past would solve the inherent pains of all existing ones. My dream is to do that. Just a dream rn tho.
amelius 3y ago
It's a quite powerful idea to run every package in its own container (sandbox). However, it depends on the implementation and Snap just sucks. (Note that the default Unix assumption is that no users can be trusted but all applications can be trusted, which is wrong imho. Containers provide a way out of this, but things get messy very fast.).
- goodpoint 3y ago
  The sandbox is not going to protect users from spyware telemetries, bad security for the application itself, ads, and so on.
  - amelius 3y ago
    Yes, but right now my smartphone is more secure wrt apps than my desktop, which is odd.
    - goodpoint 3y ago
      No, you can use a security oriented distribution, plus sandbox the applications you use.
  - fsflover 3y ago
    > The sandbox is not going to protect users from ... bad security for the application itself Your other data, in other sandboxes, is protected though.
    - goodpoint 3y ago
      Sure, but that's far from enough.
      - fsflover 3y ago
        This is the only truly reliable security approach: security by compartmentalization.
rlpb 3y ago
> The forced updating is particularly unacceptable. Snaps allow you to hold updates indefinitely now: no forced updates any more. Use "snap refresh --hold <some snap name>". See https://snapcraft.io/docs/keeping-snaps-up-to-date#heading--controlling-updates https://snapcraft.io/docs/keeping-snaps-up-to-date#heading--....
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Oh, that's good news!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- apple4ever 3y ago
  Oh wow I missed they finally gave in and fixed that. When did that happen?
makeitdouble 3y ago
I haven't run a desktop linux for years so this might be completely off, but what I got from it was there will two majors paths: - you're a hardcore oriented distro, you assume most things will be built from source, follow all of your dependencies and maintain the glue for your distro. Gentoo/Slackware style。 - you value convenience and go the snaps/flatpack route. And you can still go the convenience path while building some specific apps from source, but there will be a bigger gap to bridge and it won't make sense formost applications. I get the shift, as we're already seeing it, even outside the cloud, I think it's still the best of both worlds. I compare that to how I'm running a natively compiled postgres version but a containerized mysql because it was too much of a pain to match all the dependencies.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  But there really needs to be a third path, in between the two you cite. Most Linux distros have been that third path.

srcthr 3y ago

This model destroys any reason for software to be open source. What's the point of having source code if you just run the binary provided by some party? Reminds me of the early days of the tensorflow where everyone used whatever binary package worked an no one could run anyone else's code because people kept getting stale binaries somewhere in the stack.

jcastro 3y ago
The packaging format doesn't change source code availability or restrictions.
- goodpoint 3y ago
  On a practical level it's completely different.
- eichin 3y ago
  What's the snap equivalent of "apt-get source"? Failing to find that meant for me, it was time to start purging snapd from new installs entirely (and to start fretting about ubuntu starting to be philosophically incompatible with what I want out of a system.) Fortunately even with 23.04 (server) that still seems to leave an entirely working system.

michaelt 3y ago

Snap makes it easier to distribute closed-source software like skype - but people running linux on the desktop generally have no great love of closed source software. For open source software, snap is the same software, but slower, more broken and with worse upgrades. Snap's changed the firefox update process so I now have to run 'sudo snap refresh' and wait for a download, where before I just closed and reopened it. Maybe it'll make my running application's dock icon disappear, hope you always use alt+tab instead of the dock. Snap can install ffmpeg - but I can't feed a screen recording to vaapi for compression because whoever set up the sandboxing forgot to allow that. Good luck sharing anything from, say, ~/.config/ on, say, discord - you get a silent unexplained failure, because hidden folder access is blocked by the sandbox. Installing a browser? With snap you get three copies; you can adjust refresh.retain down to only keep 2 copies - but 1 copy is out of the question. There's a reason canonical has to force snap down people's throats, and it's because nobody uses it by choice.