Since 16.04, Snaps have been a huge pain for me with running LXC in production environments.
By default, Snap applies updates and restarts Systemd services anytime it likes, and there's no way to turn this behavior off! The only way to get around it is to download the Snap package binary and install that directly. Then Snap won't "know" where to get updates.
(Caveat emptor: "Workarounds" like this can easily lead to a bad security scenario, since any critical security patches won't be installed by any standard system update process)
Did I mention that a fair percentage of the time the Snap updates would leave LXC in a completely broken state? In production (and development, too)!
The final nail in the coffin in this scenario comes in the form of Snap being the official recommended way to install LXC. I don't know if Stéphane and friends even publish Debian packages anymore.
I get the idea behind snap and appreciate it, but the lack of configurability and no clear definition of what stable really even means . . .
1. prevent machines in the fleet from pulling the broken LXD update
2. rollback broken machines to the previously working LXD version on the same channel, since it no longer existed in the Snap Store™.
What a joke! Now we're burnt on snap _and_ LXD.
Some developers are trying to package for Debian. The work is in progress at https://wiki.debian.org/LXD
I really have no idea what people are thinking sometimes.
A cultural acceptance of WIP software seems common, in free software communities, in my experience.
Even if people should be updating regularly, forcing them feels completely antithetical to the Linux ethos of users having control over their devices.
Since 2017: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1575053
With Ubuntu I just wait until the next LTS.
Due to LXC now being a snap, the file is simply not there. I guess it's 5 layers deep in namespaces, overlayfs and other stuff. I was so fed up with this that I removed Ubuntu (and replaced it with Gentoo).
(Same-but-different for enforcing non-interactive mode on installs.)
The idea with LTS is to be predictable and stable.
Put another way:
- desktop people want ALL UPDATES NOW.
- server people want NOTHING TO CHANGE EVER.
(yes, not exactly that, but kind of)
It is a seriously difficult thing to get right. I always applaud people to take on difficult problems and try to solve them, but I would not expect it to have any sort of robustness for another 5 years at least.
I think I am going to have to start figuring out a plan to migrate them all over to RHEL...
I don't know how must be installed on your version, but on 19.10, snap can be completely removed: the only draw back is that pulseaudio depends on it, but I guess that for a server it's not that much of a problem.
For context: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-for...
Snap developer responses are hilarious. No matter what your use case is, Snap developers know better than you, you silly irresponsible sysadmin/user. Snap is basically just another App store.
I actually really like snaps and that's the only bad experience I've had. I don't know why LXC would come in that form, very weird.
I strongly recommend anyone similarly frustrated to check out debian, which is a fantastic distro. Thanks to Kevin for posting this, but if you're using Ubuntu and disabling snap, you're fighting against the current and I have to imagine it's going to be increasingly difficult with subsequent releases.
I tossed Gentoo and KDE (this is not a Gentoo endorsement, it was just a "hey I wonder what Gentoo's been up to in the last dozen years since I last used it") on a spare laptop. It turns out that KDE is amazing now. It's seriously the best DE I've ever used, and I'm a Mac user! (Half of the utilities I install out of the box on a fresh macOS are built in, and the annoying stuff that used to be editing arcane files is now easy preference settings. It's actually great.)
What the hell are Ubuntu doing shipping Gnome (with the ugliest custom theme known to man, to boot)? Admittedly it was my own ignorance, for which they are not responsible, but their mindshare and bad choice tainted my whole view of the state of the art for a long time.
That's been the case with KDE for 15-20 years now. KDE 3.5 was a great environment (and Trinity (TDE) is a modernized fork of it).
Note that, this year, KDE added telemetry to their Plasma desktop environment. Of course, it's opt-in, so it must be acceptable, right? Well, of course, users who objected to the telemetry found bugs that caused data to be recorded even when disabled.
KDE's response was to ban said users from reddit.com/r/kde and call them "paranoid schizos." (The mods there are KDE members wearing "KDE developer" flair, not random Redditors.)
So, despite using and recommending KDE for almost 2 decades, it's hard for me to do so any longer. I wholeheartedly recommend checking out TDE instead.
It was like a different gnome - quickly reaching the desktop and lots of nice differences (like the privacy menu wasn't crafted by marketing and legal)
That’s a bit rich: are they not the #1 consumer distro, which hardly implies they are failing to execute. A successful product has missteps, so what.
> I don't want to run that garbage on my desktop.
So don’t. Why complain that others do? I use Ubuntu because it works and I can mostly find information about how to do what I want. There are major aspects of Ubuntu I don’t like (Gnome, Snap) but selecting a distro is all about choosing your compromises. I have tried Debian and other distros, but I tend to go back to Ubuntu because it works best for me.
People complain like this because they have no real control of their own lives. It makes them feel smart, if only they were in control, then things would be better. It would be so easy, the people in charge must be stupid. It comes from a lack of experience and the inability to understand the challenges in those positions.
All the hard work to make it a viable OS is done by Debian. Canonical just adds some polish and then wrecks it all with poor design decisions over and over again.
Snaps may be a pain sometimes, but Gnome seems to be working like a charm...
> That’s a bit rich: are they not the #1 consumer distro, which hardly implies they are failing to execute.
No, that's Debian doing almost all the work.
90% of the packages in Ubuntu are simply taken from Debian without significant modification.
But have you been following last year's improvements to GNOME's performance and responsiveness? A lot of it is Canonical's devs bringing their experience from Unity.
there is no need for latency-hiding animations and subsequently trying to make them run smoothly on the gpu if there's no perceptible latency.
I hear a lot of praise for Unity and I'm the kind of person who enjoy trying out new stuff and Linux Desktops is no exception.
For me, Unity was broken because of alt-tab (behavior and lack of configurability).
It might work for everyone else but when I want to switch back to the last or second last thing I worked with I want that done now.
I don't want to look at the tab switcher to ponder what to do next, just alt-tab, done.
This has worked consistently in every Windows since at least 3.1 (the first my family owned), and in every Linux desktop environment I've used except Unity and Gnome 3. And in Gnome 3 it was at least configurable.
This might seem trivial to a lot of you but to keep focus I keep one application maximized most of the time. I don't use them side by side. Then when I need to reference something (Jira, vendor documentation etc) I alt-tab. Same goes for slack.
I think this model is underrated, for all that it can sometimes be annoying. Consistency is valuable. Constant change is not good, even when the changes themselves are positive. But it does mean you'll sometimes be left with out-of-date software.
Edit: Oh, I should mention that you can also use Debian testing to get frequent updates. Primary issue here there is Debian Testing actually gets security updates later than Debian Stable.
Seriously, a whole bar for a WATCH? How come good old Gnome2 did it better 15 years ago, and had a terrific hierarchical menu, to add?
And that is doable now, considering Thunderbolt. Hell, Oneplus should try to push OxygenOS to be tablet-like and this would set them apart from everyone.
Upstart was started alongside or even before systemd, if I recall correctly.
It is true that the Debian people are doing a great job.
> [...] if you're using Ubuntu and disabling snap, you're fighting against the current and I have to imagine it's going to be increasingly difficult with subsequent releases.
Actually, snap was harder to remove in the previous release: you had to rebuild certain packages (actually, just pulseaudio, so it only matters for desktops) to get rid of the dependency, but it seems now that it's just a couple of apt commands, so you have to give Canonical credits for making it easier.
python3-ubuntu-image
xubuntu-desktop
xubuntu-core
vanilla-gnome-desktop
ubuntustudio-desktop-core
ubuntustudio-desktop
ubuntukylin-desktop
ubuntu-unity-desktop
ubuntu-snappy-cli
ubuntu-snappy
ubuntu-mate-desktop
ubuntu-mate-core
ubuntu-core-launcher
ubuntu-budgie-desktop
snapd-xdg-open
snapcraft
snap-confine
qml-module-snapd
plasma-discover-backend-snap
lxd
lubuntu-desktop
libsnapd-qt1
kubuntu-desktop
ember
cyphesis-cpp
chromium-browser
ubuntu-server
ubuntu-desktop-minimal
ubuntu-desktop
ubuntu-core-snapd-units
livecd-rootfs
maas
apparmor
libsnapd-glib1
gnome-software-plugin-snap
command-not-found
sigh...
Edit: Please note that many of these are "leaf" packages, by which I mean that no other packages depend on them.
upstart was pretty good. It just lost the popularity contest with systemd. I'm not sure if there's really anything serious to complain here about.
Please read the HN guidelines: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work". Link at the bottom-left.
Do you know Red Hat and google were using upstart? This companies must be hyper incompetent if they run garbage.
I'm seriously considering not taking the 20.04 LTS release and either using 18.04 until it's untenable or switching to something else.
Snaps break debain's stable release model. They allow upstream to ship updates outside of the normal 6 month ubuntu releases. There are times when you might want this, but it should be opt in not mandatory. I thinking specifically of lxd which is only shipped via snaps.
The snap store's trust model is confusing. Its hard to tell who is making the packages and how they are sandboxed. If I'm going to install a proprietary piece of software I want to know exactly what it can and can't do. Lately I've been using firejail when I need to run things like this.
And now for a minor complaint that also feels most user hostile to me: why do the snap developers think its ok to require a non hidden directory in $HOME? Seriously my home directory is MINE, if you have to store application state there at least have the decency to do it in a hidden directory.
4 years old now.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1575053
(That said, I would still prefer that they not be.)
In fairness, I think that's the point, just like RHEL streams.
> There are times when you might want this, but it should be opt in not mandatory. I thinking specifically of lxd which is only shipped via snaps.
Yeah, decent idea, poor execution. Especially for system/infrastructure software like LXD. I want a stable kernel, a stable glibc, a stable LXD/Docker/k8s/whatever, and then on top, bleeding-edge applications that will not break the world if they autoupdate at random to a less-tested version.
After fighting with node, vlc and ffmpeg snaps not working reliably, I had to add a warning for my PhotoStructure users on Ubuntu to avoid those packages (and how to install them via apt).
I agree with a bunch of people here: snap promises some great features, but in practice the horrible performance, additional resource consumption, and spotty reliability led to me actively avoiding snap packages and looking for an alternative installation.
Applications need a place to save state, and you don't really want it to be hidden, because sometimes I as a user do need to change it manually for any number of obscure reasons. So you make a subfolder that's designated for apps to write to.
There's no good way to put this into the existing Linux model though. All you'd do is add yet another standard a la https://xkcd.com/927/
It seems that canonical does best when they embrace the ecosystem and not try to replace it.
> If you’re a Fedora user and you want to install Spotify, you’re told to go to https://snapcraft.io/spotify. Spotify doesn’t distribute RPM packages, appimage, Flatpak or anything useful to a Fedora user who wants to download it, or to a Fedora maintainer who wants to add it to a repository. Fedora users are told to go to what is essentially a commercial store operated by a RedHat competitor where stats tell them their distribution is only 7th best.
> We’re in luck, we can still download the .deb. If Spotify stops caring, what do we do? We move to snap because we have to? Will the snap store continue to let people download actual .snap files in the future or will that get locked down ? Will the snap store continue to operate without an Ubuntu One account or will we get vendor-locked ?
Canonical provides the tools and several companies are providing their software as snap packages.
Another example is JetBrains that provide all their development environments as snap packages.
While I don't like the tech, the real reason Snap pushes me away from Ubuntu is the fear of this future where the app store dream turned out to be a failure again. What happens to the distro then?
The snap thing is a pain in the ass. I understand the need for something like snap or flatpak. I had software too new or too old that wouldn't work because some dependencies were not updated or were too new. Snaps can solve that by allowing the developers to provide everything you need (or everything you need that is not on your system). But why would I want a snap calculator or a snap system monitor? On 19.04 it would take a couple seconds to open the calculator...thank god they reverted those apps as normal packages.
Now I feel like I felt on Windows when I had to be extra careful installing software in case somethign weird came in the installer. What kind of package is this? Is it a snap? Can I install the normal package? Is the snap provided by someone trustworthy?
I also had to install Unity. Gnome lacks support for multiple monitors. Some stuff like the dash working only on the main monitor breaks completely my workflow. Almost for every action I want to make I have to change my focus to the main monitor.
I'll probably give Budgie a go.
To be fair, my Thinkpad from work is the first laptop that has issues with when (dis)connecting a screen. When disconnecting I need to turn on the laptop screen before disconnecting; for connecting I can usually log in without screen and use Super+P to switch modes and that fixes it.
But other than this first instance, I never heard of this being an issue and people here talk about it as if it's commonplace. I must have used or seen Linux used on at least 30 laptops with 2 (or more) screens without issue in the last ~10 years, counting the ones at my previous employer as one because they were all the same hardware even if people ran different distributions.
The latest snap I had to get rid of was Visual Studio Code, because I was trying to work on an open source game with it, and I found out that if I launched the game from inside Visual Studio Code, my game wouldn't play sounds because it couldn't communicate with PulseAudio, and attempting to use ALSA just straight up gave me an error.
On the other hand, I've only had positive experiences with AppImage. Gives you an all-in-one image that you can directly execute if you like, and no sandboxing nonsense.
https://firejail.wordpress.com/documentation-2/appimage-supp...
I had run it via X11Forwarding (I had a contusion and used a puny laptop to connect to my desktop) and it was not a smooth ride, so it's not an entirely representative experience, but it shows that it's not all painless, yet.
I realize I have to soon upgrade from Ubuntu 16.04, so a while ago I installed 19.10 to see what to roughly expect from 20.04, as there are quite a few changes. Trying things out, I installed VS Code from the Ubuntu Store; I was quite disappointed to see things going south right on the Welcome page, as the snap version of vscode couldn't even open a web browser (instead, Firefox promptly crashed every time).
Of course, being able to open a web browser from VS Code isn't a necessity, but for some reason for me it just seemed like the install was rather broken by default, and surely almost no one could have used it much not to notice a simple thing like that right away – and the thought that even if the problem was noticed and simply shrugged at didn't really make me want to see what else did not work.
I expect you needed to do something like that for the VS Code snap.
Because hearing things like `sudo apt install chromium` actually aliases to using snap is disconcerting to say the least if true.
But I'd like to throw in a recommendation for Fedora. It includes Flatpak by default (which to me as always been the least objectionable sandboxing system) but nothing comes as a flatpak by default. You have to explicitly choose to use it.
Fedora's hardware support is second to none, and even supports in-OS BIOS updates.
I highly recommend it.
However, if you want to use chromium-browser you are out of luck. It is no longer available as a .deb package.
What is "performant" supposed to mean here?
Is Flatpak faster than Snap? more compact? simpler? more reliable/secure? easier to use? more efficient in terms of cpu/memory/communication/power/etc.? all of the above?
Snap suffers from the overhead of having to decompress a squashfs on program launch: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/squashfs-is-a-terrible-storage-...
My experimetsn on the same laptop showed that..
Launching Skype installed from deb is almost instant.
From snap it takes around 10sec to get anything to show.
This is on quite fast nvme disk.
Yes, Flatpak is just bind mounts and namespaces. It doesn't have the overhead of the squashfs images.
I really hate Snap/Flatpak conceptually. Use the package manager. That's what it's there for. FPM is a way to make package building easier.
Snap/Flat tools feel like they're about the same as Electron cancer; and I bet we'll see more closed source commercial stuff pushed to the Linux world via them as well.
By the way, what is it with Docker that makes it hard or impossible for it to be used for this exact purpose?
It's also disingenuous to suggest a browser wrapped in a cryptocurrency promotional wallet thing as a comparable alternative.
Sure, but some people just want to have their problem fixed and they only have a sledgehammer in front of them. If it works, is it really that bad?
> a browser wrapped in a cryptocurrency promotional wallet thing
I think you have it the wrong way around. It's a browser containing an integration with a cryptocurrency wallet, not the other way around. You'd still be able to use it as a normal browser if you ignore the cryptocurrency stuff.
They give the suggestion to remove via
sudo rm -rf /var/cache/snapd/ && sudo apt autoremove --purge snapd && rm -fr ~/snap
sudo bash -c "cat > /etc/apt/preferences.d/no-snapd.pref" << EOL
Package: snapd
Pin: origin ""
Pin-Priority: -1
EOLSo shortly after the Mir fiasco, why does Canonical feel it necessary to come up with the next dumb idea?
Other than that, I do not think other packages are affected.
I think most users will be fine. Those of us who need more fine grained control, can have it.
Annoying but harmless: it's start time has multiplied.
Workflow-breaking: Chromium now can't see my NFS mounts anymore.
It's not just about having a pretty home directory.
It's distributed as AppImage for Linux. Very much recommended.
https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-setup#remove-snap
This is needed because an every growing number op packages is "dependant" on it.
Here I show how to install Chromium as a DEB package from Debian (on a buntu):
I'm not against stuff changing, but tell us up front, explain what's changed and make sure that you're not breaking existing things or provide a way for people to keep their existing stuff work, a flag that says that following symbolic links is OK ... and put that UI in Chromium itself, not in some other box somewhere
I despise the bug, it causes so much trouble without a way to turn it off. Plus the switch to snap happened exactly during a critical vuln which meant people were running on critically vulnerable chromium for weeks.
A workound is posted at https://bugs.launchpad.net/snapd/+bug/1776873/comments/29 (simple patch & recompile). May be worth making a PPA for the fixed snapd if we can't get the Canonical dev team to fix the core issue.
It's extremely weird to see this kind of thing when it happens too, you usually trust Firefox to work!
I prefer the isolation of snaps so I’m willing to put a little work into it, but understand not everyone cares to do that.
It also causes data loss: https://bugs.launchpad.net/snapd/+bug/1616650
My only con is that the defaults update all snaps like every day, and I really would like to have better control on that, because I'm always on mobile data.
No startup slowness, and you'll still get the vendor-provided updates as they're released.
2. Is the whole packaging a pain? Just do the work once and create the snapcraft.yaml packaging file that describes the whole process. You can even use the snap build server to rebuild fresh snap packages (in six architectures) as soon as you make a commit to your repository.
3. Are you a software company that wants to distribute your software? You can do all the snap building in-house.
4. The same snap works in many many distributions.
In this month only I had to give up using firefox because uglyBar and ubuntu because of snaps.
There won't be anywhere to run soon.
tl;dr -> HashiCorp's various tools exist as snaps but none are published by HashiCorp. All are out of date. Some have incorrect metadata. Few provide any clue as to who or where the upstream is. There's usually not even a way to contact the snap author to submit patches or ask for an upstream link. eg https://snapcraft.io/nomad
There is a level of care here which I think is great. Some engineer somewhere made sure that the system would still work without snaps. This is a very Debian attitude which Ubuntu inherits from and which I would like to celebrate for a bit :-)
Along with the native package "bundles" (e.g. dev-tools, ruby-basic, containers-virt, etc.) that include built-in dependencies, Flatpak/FlatHub apps seem to work better than Snap/Snapcraft in my experience.
I wonder what is about to happen to the desktop experience for Clear Linux.
/var/snap is a subvolume. Purging snapd wants to remove the /var/snap directory, but it being mounted subvolume, it will fail. Purging snapd will therefore also fail.
Destroy (-r) the /var/snap subvolume before apt purge snapd.
Similarly, if using flatpak, create a new subvolume for /var/lib/flatpak before installing the first one. You don't need to snapshot your flatpaks together with the /.
I have been using Xubuntu 20.04 for several weeks and it has worked well. Because that's a high end laptop I have not bothered to uninstall snap yet, although that has been on my mind.
I am surprised that the article writes there are snaps installed by default. Checking in Xubuntu 20.04 that's luckily not the case
$ snap list
No snaps are installed yet. Try 'snap install hello-world'.
$ apt show chromium-browser
Package: chromium-browser
Version: 80.0.3987.163-0ubuntu1
...
Pre-Depends: debconf, snapd
...
Description: Transitional package - chromium-browser -> chromium snap
This is a transitional dummy package. It can safely be removed.
.
chromium-browser is now replaced by the chromium snap.
People like me who would like a system that works their way, even if it's not the same way as the distribution maintainers - nope. Believe it or not, I don't want my desktop to be full of animations, I want updates to happen on my schedule, and I care about having the active title bar a different colour to the rest.
People who believe in Free As In Freedom - it's still technically free, but for all practical purposes it might as well not be if you have to recompile a core package for things like using a non-standard home directory path. This is one of many things where I sigh and go Freedom wasnt meant to be like this.
The average non-techy user - uses windows anyway, and has access to a much larger software ecosystem as a result.
Not fun to think that could have happened on a production env if people didn't disable snap.
That does not forbid others to package LXD independently. Debian has been close to packaging LXD at https://wiki.debian.org/LXD It is a matter of picking up interest to complete the work.
It's not much of a problem for me since I believe that keeping diversity of Web browser is necessary for the healthy Web ecosystem and I force myself to use Firefox. And I really hate Chromium force me to waste CPU time on some kind of test payload occasionaly, it use 100% of a core and there is no way to disable it.
I'm fine with restricting myself to use Firefox since I'm not a Web frontend developer so I don't need to test Chromium behaviours myself. But others may not.
Flatpak exists and works. The application I'm working on is distributed on Flathub, and I don't have the time nor the interest to learn yet another packaging system.
Ubuntu would do well trying to not just lead (which they do in some aspects, I'm sure) but also try to follow when it's more appropriate. The push towards Unity and now Snap just causes more fragmentation in the Linux community.
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man8/update-alter...
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/g7cv6k/debs...
The deb tries to install the Chromium snap package ;)
Inspired by this post I checked what is actually offered as a snap.
This one surprised me: https://snapcraft.io/aws-kernel
Who can explain me how I would use a kernel running as a snap?
Well, last updated 2017, so I don't think I want to try that one.
Just tried to install 20.04 on LVM. It gets in to a completely broken state if you misconfigure the network due to an error in an exception handler in an Python error handling view in the UI. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
a) is it possible to use Chromium without snaps?
b) Can anybody please describe the general experience with Centos for a media production machine - needs to run NVIDIA GPU support, Ardour, low latency jackd and Davinci Resolve on XFCE.
sudo apt install gnome-software-plugin-flatpakufw < firewall-config
===============
I like & prefer Ubuntu. But where else is Fedora/CentOS/other distros ahead of Ubuntu?