this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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Ubuntu Linux

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Linux for Human Beings.

Ubuntu is a popular Linux operating system for PC / mobile devices, etc.

Developed by Canonical & based on Debian (another older Linux OS) which is known for it's rock solid stability.

Ubuntu is trusted everywhere computing by professionals and common users alike.

https://ubuntu.com/

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The most annoying thing for me was the huge internet data usage by snap updates but it is better now. (files.mastodon.social)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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The most annoying thing for me was the huge internet data usage by snap updates but it is better now.

Even though it showed 300mb for a Firefox update, but only consumed 80mb and everything updated and working wonderfully ! πŸ˜… 😍 πŸ‘‘

The New app store is beautiful πŸ™Œ

(just sharing my experience πŸ˜… )

@ubuntu #ubuntu #snaps #appstore #snapd #gnome

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I still want to be able to choose whether or not to use snaps. I don’t care how friendly they get.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

I understand the sentiment. That said, you're forced to use deb files from Ubuntu's repositories. 🫠 There are some fundamental choices that are made for you by the OS developers. Sometimes you have more leeway, sometimes less. It's not the first time and this isn't the only system component people have complained about. Ultimately if a user disagrees with a choice that the OS developer has made about a system upon which the OS developer depends to ship a working system, it's probably wiser to switch OSes than fuck around with the system.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

You are correct. When on Ubuntu I tried to remove the entire snapd system but as soon as I ran an update it the system reinstalled it

So I immediately moved to Mint. And now that LMDE 6 became available I immediately moved to that. And I couldn't be happier. Works great.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Makes sense. I've been pretty excited about snap on desktop since 2014-15 since it promised to deliver Android-style unbreakable software update capability that finally unlocks updating parts of the system out of band and safely. I switched to snap from all the PPAs I used in 2016. GIMP, Inkscape, etc. I think I was able to get rid of the remaining PPAs in 2018. No package breakage since then, trivial OS upgrades. My main machine has been upgraded through every LTS since 14.04. It's glorious. Yes there were some bugs with snap itself and missing features, cough.. "pending update notification" ..cough, but that's par for the course for any system under development and I've never seen a real showstopper so far. Flatpak is also useful of course and I do use it but it can't do system components as far as I know.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you for sharing that because you do make a great and important point about snaps, namely that they can replace unsecure PPA's with secure Snaps. That sounds like the best argument for Snaps.

Personally I didn't have a problem with the Snaps themselves, but the forcing me to use it cough... "Firefox" ....cough...

At least have Firefox in the apt repo so people have a choice. That's literally** what the Free Software movement is about: the user has the choice and power. Not the dev or even the machine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The security sandbox provided by snap is a major point to allowing packages "from anywhere" that you don't necessarily fully trust. Like 3rd party vendor packages. The deb installer runs the package installation of debs as root and it allows them to do anything. I'm not even talking about running the software, a deb can run anything and do anything to the OS at install time. Its security model requires trusted repositories where someone gatekeeps what packages can reach your computer. Snap had the sandbox design since its inception to solve this problem. It wasn't something tacked on later.

The Firefox snap rollout was a shit show. The snap package itself had defects such as lacking important performance optimizations that were done in other snap packages for example. Then there was the update notification that bugged people to close the app only to show again if they reopened it soon after. Those were ultimately solvable problems but Canonical let them trickle into most users' desktops during an LTS release... And this was many people's first impression of snap - those few annoying bugs - even if the system has been solid and running, solving real use cases for years prior. A.k.a. a shit show.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Appreciate the heads up. I started tinkering with Ubuntu on the Pi 5, one if the first things I went about doing was removing snap, grabbing a .deb repo for Firefox and installing flatpak.

If snap is restored as part of system upgrades, I may switch back over to raspbian, or check out other distros to tinker with.

I have to say, Ubuntu on the Pi is quite nice, and Wayland is working wonderfully on it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Yes Ubuntu is a great OS, which is why the whole snaps thing was so sad. Everyone already loves Ubuntu and uses it, why force snaps on users? Have both snaps and flatpak and let the user have the freedom to use both.

Simply makes no sense to ban fkatpak support out of the box and make users do it manually. Why? The flavours were adding flatpak support for the convenience of the user which is great, but canonical said they had to stop doing that or else they cannot be an Ubuntu flavour anymore.

Very strong handed mafia style bullshit that doesn't belong in FREE SOFTWARE.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I can get debs from other sources, I can add non Ubuntu repos to my apt list. I can download a deb and unpack it to see what’s in it. But that’s not really my issue, I don’t want everything containerized in a proprietary format. I am currently using a different distro because of this but having used Ubuntu since 4.10 I have a pretty long relationship with the distro.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That said, you're forced to use deb files from Ubuntu's repositories. 🫠

Well, they probably compile everything from source after doing a full security audit of the code, right? 🫠🫠

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

As much as the snap packaged code. Line by line audits with formal proofs. 🫠

This fascination with snap being somehow fundamentally different from the deb repos situation is weird.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Exactly. This is the issue: forced use of Snaps. The Snaps themselves aren't worse than Flatpaks but no one wants to be forced to use them.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I kind of dislike the 50 bazillion mounted block devices. I'm an old gray beard at this point and I like my CLI. That's really my only complaint about it. It just seems unnatural to me. Otherwise they're fine mostly.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I've seen very similar use of loop devices in an automotive app management implementation. Each app has its own filesystem image that gets mounted on a loop device on installation, then runs from it. It's annoying on the command line but it's not a bad use case of the facility. ☺️

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

@SaintNewts As a beginner i don't know much about mounting points, anyway i hope it will be fixed in the future πŸ™ƒ

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is it possible to enable "TPM-backed FDE" after already installing the OS? (I upgraded from previous version).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

@amenotef I'm sorry I don't have enough knowledge about that.. But seems it's an experimental feature so proceed with caution! πŸ˜…

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

They work pretty well on 22.04 LTS too. That's the beauty of them, they can much more easily be updated cross-OS-release. I switched my snapd to snap as well and now the whole stack is updated independently of the rest of the system. I haven't used PPAs for a few years now as a result. Following that, OS upgrades have been completely trouble free. No more broken packages left behind from forgotten PPAs.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

@avidamoeba πŸ™ŒπŸΎπŸ™ŒπŸΎπŸ™ŒπŸΎ

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's more of a double edged sword: snaps were great imho when they replaced the mess of old we had going on with thirty or so incompatible ppas.

But why force snaps for central stuff like FF/Chromium and soon Thunderbird?

I just upgraded an old PC and reinstalling Ubuntu meant that all my configs of these apps and then some broke. Snap is using incompatible storage for dotfiles and configurations. And more often than not central Desktop functions like the cursors (atm no hand cursor in FF for me!), sound and common extensions don't work ootb. For the odd piece of speciality sw I'd had to go hunting for before that's alright. But not for everyday stuff

Come on canonical, don't enshittify you great distribution...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

@jfx Yes..You're right..