I see people hate snap packaging and removing it if their OS support it. Is it because it’s NOT fully open-source or just due to how the technology works?
This threads got lots of good answers, but I haven’t seen it mentioned that snaps sometimes mean reduced functionality.
Use the docker snap? Sorry, it can only access your home directory so no -v /some/path:/somewhere for you
Use firefox or chromium and keepassxc? Sorry, your browser plugin won’t be able to talk to your password manager
And the updates… dear god. In whose mind was it a good idea to show a “firefox is updating, exit now to avoid issues” TWO WEEKS im advance. Closing the app does precisely fuck all unless you manually snap refresh it
Containerised applications are a fine idea, but snap is a horrible implementation of it
To be fair, those are both issues with flatpak too. You can change the file system permissions with a command or flatseal, but I don’t know of a fix for the password extension issue.
In general the integration of flatpak is quite good (even more if we compare it with snap), but there are still some gaps. In this case there are some solutions like this one.
Mostly it has to do with how Canonical owns the snap store. if they made it so anyone could build a snap repo then a lot fewer peopl would have problems
Some of the things that have already been mentioned are true also for me, especially around permissions and assumptions about my system’s setup. However what really did it for me was when Firefox stopped recognizing my keyboard after a snap refresh. It’s just as if no input device was there for FF anymore. I found reports of the issue, but no solution. In the end I installed from a DEB repository and went through the shenanigans to prevent snap from reinstalling it.
there was this jerk working as an intern at red hat. lennart. he made the decision to break the linux dogma: do one thing and do it good. systemd was born. red hat drools. an important step towarda ending open-ness. later snaps. later closing red hat stream. profit.
if you use systemd or snaps you could just fast forward and use apple.
Same. I end up either grep -v -e tmps and loop mounts or mount -t for each type of physical mount. I suppose lsblk and findmnt might have better options and views.
When I run lsblk with no flags/parameters I get 18 lines of loop devices. Sure I could issue the command again and pipe thru grep to remove all the lines that have “snap” since I forgot to do it this time. I propose “snap” because couldn’t I have non snap-related loop devices?
Had a low end laptop, i believe it was lubuntu that i installed because i knew ubuntu was too bloated for that laptop. However I was not aware that it used snap and running firefox kick started the fans on that old laptop. Resouce hog seen and searching for firefox direct binary from apt seemed like a chore so i replaced with mint. Snaps automatically i did not want to deal with for old computers. Was happy with mints removal of snaps and it is very user friendly.
This was my experience too. Ubuntu asks if I want to install the docker snap, I say sure. I then try to use docker and it’s completely unable to do what I need. I then need to figure out how to uninstall the snap and then install docker normally.
I tried a few snaps, but everytime they were a pain in the ass and I regretted it. Now I avoid them at all costs
Same with Docker. Installed it because Ubuntu recommended it then spent a month trying to figure out why all my docker containers would randomly shutdown and restart themselves. I knew snap auto-installed updates, but had no idea it would do it even if the program was currently running and in use.
Here’s my answer to this same question from an old thread on Reddit:
My Ubuntu system always reserved a whopping 20% of my 32GB ram for no reason and I never bothered to know why. Later I uninstalled snapd because of boot time issues and guess what happened? Only 1.5 GB used after a fresh boot.
I had like 4 different JetBrains IDEs installed via snap with each totalling around 2GB of disk space. While removing snapd I discovered it kept back 2-3 previous versions of every package on your disk.
Uninstalling this bloat was the best thing I did to my ubuntu system. It was suddenly light as a feather and way more responsive like I just did a fresh system install.
Some time later I was installing something from apt and Ubuntu tried to install it from snap, thus sneakily installing snapd in the process. Looking for a solution, I felt like I was looking up how to disable Windows updates or some other shit.
I had a moment of clarity and wondered why the fuck did I have to put up with this kinda bullshit on Linux. I wiped that drive clean and switched to Fedora.
I actually think jetbrains are the ones keeping old versions. On my windows machine, when I get an ide update, the old one is saved so I can revert back to it.
I might need to switch over as well, but I really don’t like rpm (or whatever that’s called on fedora, zypper or something? or was that suse?). I’ve been a Debian user since woody was a new thing and then at some point I gradually moved to ubuntu due to better desktop experience and more up to date packages (back then Debian stable really wasn’t anywhere close of bleeding edge) and PPA support was great for my needs. Now I have ubuntu installations which have gone trough upgrades for years and installations I have doesn’t seem to work like I want them to. Some of the issues will most likely stay (as RMS said, nvidia rapes babies or something like that) but in general I don’t like my browser, signal client and whatnot to notify me that I need to shut them down NOW since they’ll upgrade at some point in next 3-6 months. Simple apt dist-upgrade isn’t enough anymore and the systems require more and more TLC than I’m willing to give to them. Snapd is at least related to the issues I have 8 times out of 10.
Ubuntu just doesn’t have the feel it used to and it’s getting annoying enough that the simpler way would be just to reinstall everything and switch to something else, even if it takes some time and effort to migrate 5+ year old installations to new system.
Fedora uses DNF, with rpms under the hood, not sure how that works, haha. Honestly I have no problems with it. I’m no power user, but it does everything I need. The only downside being kinda slow repo fetches.
Maybe LM:DE (Linux Mint: Debian Edition)? Obscure software can be a pain to install for the usual reason, but otherwise I’m finding this to be a great distro. Second choice is Solus, but that’s even worse when it comes to software.
At best it works more or less the same as an ordinary package. It only gets worse from there.
Several times I’ve been stuck on a broken version of Discord because on the server side they force an update to the new client, and the new client has not been packaged as a Snap yet.
Getting native hosts to work in Firefox is possible, but a giant pain in the butt.
Basically anything that needs filesystem access is unreasonably troublesome. I gave up on getting Snaps to work with my external drives.
There is simply no scenario where I think “wow, I sure am glad this was packaged as a Snap!” There have been many scenarios where I thought “god dammit why is this a Snap?!”
Several times I’ve been stuck on a broken version of Discord because on the server side they force an update to the new client, and the new client has not been packaged as a Snap yet.
To be fair this is more of an issue with Discord than snap… Would be understandable if it was an urgent security fix but they do it every time, and then it breaks for everybody who is using anything else than the deb or tar.gz they provide.
Workaround for Fedora: Edit /usr/lib64/discord/resources/build_info.json and increase the version number to whatever Discord tells you is the new version. And hope that the update wasn’t a fix for some remote code execution vulnerability :)
because the snap folder in your home directory by default starts with a lowercase letter while all the other folders start with uppercase (hidden folders don’t count)
Downloads and Documents starting with a capital letter is my biggest pet peeve with Ubuntu. It makes it a lot more annoying to navigate through them than if it was all lower case.
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