You act as if Snap was bad in any way. Proprietary backend does not equal bad.
I don’t give a rats ass if things I use are propietary or not. FOSS is obviously nice to have, but if something else does the work better I’m all for it, and have paid for several pieces of software. But Ubuntu and Snap (which are running on the thing I’m writing this with) are just objectivey bad. Software updates are even more aggressive than with Windows today and even if I try to work with the “<this software> updates in X days, restart now to update” notifications it just doesn’t do what it says it would/should. And once the package is finally updated the nagging notification returns in a day or two.
Additionally, snap and/or ubuntu has bricked at least two of my installations in the last few years, canonicals solutions has broken apt/dpkg in a very fundamental way and it most definetly has caused way more issues with my linux-stuff over the years than anything else, systemd included.
Trying to twist that as an elitist point of view with FOSS (which there are plenty of, obviously) is misleading and just straight up false. Snapcraft and it’s implementation is just broken on so many levels and has pushed me away from ubuntu (and derivatives). Way back when ubuntu started to gain traction it was a really welcomed distribution and I was a happy user for at least a decade, but as then things are now it’s either Debian (mostly for servers) or Mint (on desktops) for me. Whenever I have the choise I won’t even consider ubuntu as an option, both commercially at work and for my personal things.
You keep saying broken but Canonical has an entire OS that is made up of Snaps and it works well. I used snaps on multiple devices and it rarely gave me trouble. Nothing is perfect but “fundamentally broken” is bullshit.
Trying to twist that as an elitist point of view with FOSS (which there are plenty of, obviously) is misleading and just straight up false.
I recognize that your reasons for disliking snaps go deeper than screeching about how flatpak repos are selfhostable and Canonical is trying to take over Linux or whatever. But that’s what I mainly encounter on all social media. Hatred for a piece of tech simply because other people said it’s bad, therefore it must be.
Auto updating is not inherently bad. Regular users don’t keep their systems up to date and so Snap does it for them. I get that this pisses some people off because it resembles windows, but guess why windows works this way? Its users don’t know how to update either. So Microsoft chose to rather piss off a few nerds with default automatic updates than risk millions of computers being vulnerable.
For an advanced user it just can’t be a problem to postpone snap updates with a simple command.
Nothing is perfect but “fundamentally broken” is bullshit.
Compared on how things used to work when Ubuntu came to life it really is fundamentally broken. I’m not the oldest beard around, but I personally have updated both Debian and Ubuntu from obsoleted relase to a current one with very little hiccups in the way. Apt/dpkg is just so good that you could literally bring up a decade old distribution up to date and it was almost without no efforts. The updates ran whenever I chose them to and didn’t break production servers when unattended upgrades were enabled. This is very much not the case with Ubuntu today.
Hatred for a piece of tech simply because other people said it’s bad, therefore it must be.
I realize that this isn’t directly because of my comment, but there’s plenty of evidence even on this chain that the problems go way deeper than few individuals ranting over the net that snap is bad. As I already said, it’s objectively worse than the alternatives we’ve had since the 90’s. And the way canonical bundles snap with apt breaks that very long tradition where you could just rely that, when running stable distribution, you could be pretty much certain that ‘apt-get dist-upgrade’ wouldn’t break your system. And even if it did, you could always fix it manually and get the thing back to speed. And this isn’t just a old guy ranting how things were better in the past as you can still get the very reliable experience today, but not with snapd.
Auto updating is not inherently bad.
I’m not complaining about auto updates. They are very useful and nice to have, even for advanced users. The problem is that even if snap notification says that ‘software updates now’ it often really doesn’t. Restarting the software, and even some cases running manual update, still brings up the notification that the very same software I updated a second ago needs to restart again to update. Rinse and repeat, while losing your current session over and over again.
Also, there’s absolutely no indication if anything is actually done. The notification just nags that I need to stop what I’m doing RIGHT NOW and let the system do whatever it wants instead of the tools I’ve chosen to work for me. I don’t want nor need the forced interruptions for my workflow, but when I do have the spare minute to stop working, I expect that the update process actually triggers on that very second and not after some random delay and I also want a progress bar or something to indicate when things are complete and I can resume doing whatever I had in mind.
it just can’t be a problem to postpone snap updates with a simple command.
But it is. “<your software> is updating now” message just interrupts pretty much everything I’ve been doing and at that point there’s no way to stop it. And after some update process has finally finalized I need to pretty much reboot to regain control of my system. This is a problem which applies to everybody, regardless of their technical skills.
My computer is a tool and when I need to actively fight that tool to not interrupt whatever I’m doing it rubs me in a very wrong way. No matter if it’s just browsing the web or writing code to the next best thing ever or watching youtube, I expect the system to be stable for as long as I want it to be. Then there’s a separate time slot when the system can update and maybe break itself in the process, but I control when that time slot exists.
There’s not a single case that I’ve encountered where snap actually solved a problem I’ve had and there’s a plenty of times when it was either annoying or just straight up caused more problems. Systemd at least have some advantages over SysVInit, but snap doesn’t have even that.
As mentioned, I’m not the oldest linux guy around, but I’ve been running linux for 20+ years and ~15 of that has kept butter on my bread and snapcraft is easily the most annoying thing that I’ve encountered over that period.
From what I’ve seen Ubuntu LTS to LTS updates still work just fine. When I see a post on reddit asking why did it fail, it’s usually due to PPAs or because they upgraded to a LTS that released recently and something is wrong with the upgrade path. Mistakes happen, and get fixed. Windows 11 also fucked up some computers that attempted to upgrade to 24H2.
I totally get not trusting the distro anymore if it caused you so many problems tho.
I also want a progress bar or something to indicate when things are complete and I can resume doing whatever I had in min
This was actually added in 24.10. When you close the running app that wants to update, a progress bar appears under its icon in the dock. (https://youtu.be/MI0cN1tuZGU?t=5m44s)
As for the notifications, yes I can see them being annoying. But they can be turned off in the settings. In which case the ideal behaviour is you quitting the app, doing something else, and the apo quietly auto updating in the background. There are bugs. I experienced having to close Firefox for a few seconds because it wanted to update. This should be changed.
What I also don’t like is how you will encounter abandoned snaps such as qbittorrent, but under it there will be qbittorrent-something, the app maintained by another person. It would make a lot of sense to just transfer the ownership of qbittorrent to the active maintainer.
Edit: Progress is also being made to make the Snap permissions behave similarly like apps on Android. A user will open Firefox, save an image, and a popup will ask whether Firefox should be allowed to access to Downloads, or to the entire Home folder. More permissions like this are expected to arrive in the future.
I disagree for many reasons, but I realize that nobody on Lemmy really gives a shit since people here react to anything that even smells of proprietary as if it was radioactive.
I dislike it because many new to Linux go to ubuntu and it forces them to use snap which they don’t even know and have bad day because, like, “why does my download not go in the download folder but in some weird folder somewhere?? Linux is just stupid” while it is just snap that is stupid.
Firefox is literally not in Ubuntu’s repos anymore. They didn’t want to maintain it as Mozilla agreed to just make the Snap version that works across all Ubuntu versions and anywhere else.
What should the command do? Just fail? Instead it clearly tells you it’s downloading the snap of Firefox.
In fact if it was up to me I would just get rid of most GUI apps from the repos that have a snap/flatpak equivalent.
That’s correct. If you trust the client, it’s fine. Such as if your messages leave the device encrypted already. If the encryption is handled by the server tho, its license does not matter in any way, they can do whatever they want with it. I know telegram has two communication modes, and if you trust the E2E one then all should be well. (I don’t know how great Telegram’s client-side encryption is)
I’m not defending Telegram here, I don’t really trust it, but all that matters in encrypted communication in general is whether the client app is secure and no sensitive data leave it unencrypted.
You act as if Snap was bad in any way. Proprietary backend does not equal bad.
Edit: Most people don’t care about FOSS vs proprietary. And the snap client is FOSS anyways, plus it’s capable of installing snaps from local files.
I will not use a system with snap and has nothing to do with being proprietary.
One of the reasons that I could not use Ubuntu is that I cannot control using snap or not. They even use it to install apps that you install via apt.
The fact that the only time I did use a system with snap left me with the impression that it is an absolute performance pig certainly does not help.
I don’t give a rats ass if things I use are propietary or not. FOSS is obviously nice to have, but if something else does the work better I’m all for it, and have paid for several pieces of software. But Ubuntu and Snap (which are running on the thing I’m writing this with) are just objectivey bad. Software updates are even more aggressive than with Windows today and even if I try to work with the “<this software> updates in X days, restart now to update” notifications it just doesn’t do what it says it would/should. And once the package is finally updated the nagging notification returns in a day or two.
Additionally, snap and/or ubuntu has bricked at least two of my installations in the last few years, canonicals solutions has broken apt/dpkg in a very fundamental way and it most definetly has caused way more issues with my linux-stuff over the years than anything else, systemd included.
Trying to twist that as an elitist point of view with FOSS (which there are plenty of, obviously) is misleading and just straight up false. Snapcraft and it’s implementation is just broken on so many levels and has pushed me away from ubuntu (and derivatives). Way back when ubuntu started to gain traction it was a really welcomed distribution and I was a happy user for at least a decade, but as then things are now it’s either Debian (mostly for servers) or Mint (on desktops) for me. Whenever I have the choise I won’t even consider ubuntu as an option, both commercially at work and for my personal things.
You keep saying broken but Canonical has an entire OS that is made up of Snaps and it works well. I used snaps on multiple devices and it rarely gave me trouble. Nothing is perfect but “fundamentally broken” is bullshit.
I recognize that your reasons for disliking snaps go deeper than screeching about how flatpak repos are selfhostable and Canonical is trying to take over Linux or whatever. But that’s what I mainly encounter on all social media. Hatred for a piece of tech simply because other people said it’s bad, therefore it must be.
Auto updating is not inherently bad. Regular users don’t keep their systems up to date and so Snap does it for them. I get that this pisses some people off because it resembles windows, but guess why windows works this way? Its users don’t know how to update either. So Microsoft chose to rather piss off a few nerds with default automatic updates than risk millions of computers being vulnerable.
For an advanced user it just can’t be a problem to postpone snap updates with a simple command.
Compared on how things used to work when Ubuntu came to life it really is fundamentally broken. I’m not the oldest beard around, but I personally have updated both Debian and Ubuntu from obsoleted relase to a current one with very little hiccups in the way. Apt/dpkg is just so good that you could literally bring up a decade old distribution up to date and it was almost without no efforts. The updates ran whenever I chose them to and didn’t break production servers when unattended upgrades were enabled. This is very much not the case with Ubuntu today.
I realize that this isn’t directly because of my comment, but there’s plenty of evidence even on this chain that the problems go way deeper than few individuals ranting over the net that snap is bad. As I already said, it’s objectively worse than the alternatives we’ve had since the 90’s. And the way canonical bundles snap with apt breaks that very long tradition where you could just rely that, when running stable distribution, you could be pretty much certain that ‘apt-get dist-upgrade’ wouldn’t break your system. And even if it did, you could always fix it manually and get the thing back to speed. And this isn’t just a old guy ranting how things were better in the past as you can still get the very reliable experience today, but not with snapd.
I’m not complaining about auto updates. They are very useful and nice to have, even for advanced users. The problem is that even if snap notification says that ‘software updates now’ it often really doesn’t. Restarting the software, and even some cases running manual update, still brings up the notification that the very same software I updated a second ago needs to restart again to update. Rinse and repeat, while losing your current session over and over again.
Also, there’s absolutely no indication if anything is actually done. The notification just nags that I need to stop what I’m doing RIGHT NOW and let the system do whatever it wants instead of the tools I’ve chosen to work for me. I don’t want nor need the forced interruptions for my workflow, but when I do have the spare minute to stop working, I expect that the update process actually triggers on that very second and not after some random delay and I also want a progress bar or something to indicate when things are complete and I can resume doing whatever I had in mind.
But it is. “<your software> is updating now” message just interrupts pretty much everything I’ve been doing and at that point there’s no way to stop it. And after some update process has finally finalized I need to pretty much reboot to regain control of my system. This is a problem which applies to everybody, regardless of their technical skills.
My computer is a tool and when I need to actively fight that tool to not interrupt whatever I’m doing it rubs me in a very wrong way. No matter if it’s just browsing the web or writing code to the next best thing ever or watching youtube, I expect the system to be stable for as long as I want it to be. Then there’s a separate time slot when the system can update and maybe break itself in the process, but I control when that time slot exists.
There’s not a single case that I’ve encountered where snap actually solved a problem I’ve had and there’s a plenty of times when it was either annoying or just straight up caused more problems. Systemd at least have some advantages over SysVInit, but snap doesn’t have even that.
As mentioned, I’m not the oldest linux guy around, but I’ve been running linux for 20+ years and ~15 of that has kept butter on my bread and snapcraft is easily the most annoying thing that I’ve encountered over that period.
From what I’ve seen Ubuntu LTS to LTS updates still work just fine. When I see a post on reddit asking why did it fail, it’s usually due to PPAs or because they upgraded to a LTS that released recently and something is wrong with the upgrade path. Mistakes happen, and get fixed. Windows 11 also fucked up some computers that attempted to upgrade to 24H2.
I totally get not trusting the distro anymore if it caused you so many problems tho.
This was actually added in 24.10. When you close the running app that wants to update, a progress bar appears under its icon in the dock. (https://youtu.be/MI0cN1tuZGU?t=5m44s)
As for the notifications, yes I can see them being annoying. But they can be turned off in the settings. In which case the ideal behaviour is you quitting the app, doing something else, and the apo quietly auto updating in the background. There are bugs. I experienced having to close Firefox for a few seconds because it wanted to update. This should be changed.
What I also don’t like is how you will encounter abandoned snaps such as qbittorrent, but under it there will be qbittorrent-something, the app maintained by another person. It would make a lot of sense to just transfer the ownership of
qbittorrentto the active maintainer.Edit: Progress is also being made to make the Snap permissions behave similarly like apps on Android. A user will open Firefox, save an image, and a popup will ask whether Firefox should be allowed to access to Downloads, or to the entire Home folder. More permissions like this are expected to arrive in the future.
It’s a joke, but snap is genuinely bad (and any other container runtime sucks too, but snap is the worst one)
I disagree for many reasons, but I realize that nobody on Lemmy really gives a shit since people here react to anything that even smells of proprietary as if it was radioactive.
I dislike it because many new to Linux go to ubuntu and it forces them to use snap which they don’t even know and have bad day because, like, “why does my download not go in the download folder but in some weird folder somewhere?? Linux is just stupid” while it is just snap that is stupid.
my objection to snaps came before i knew they were proprietary. they actually factually run worse
sudo apt install firefoxThis is all that needs to be said.
Firefox is literally not in Ubuntu’s repos anymore. They didn’t want to maintain it as Mozilla agreed to just make the Snap version that works across all Ubuntu versions and anywhere else.
What should the command do? Just fail? Instead it clearly tells you it’s downloading the snap of Firefox.
In fact if it was up to me I would just get rid of most GUI apps from the repos that have a snap/flatpak equivalent.
Telegram’s client is also open source. The servers are not.
That’s correct. If you trust the client, it’s fine. Such as if your messages leave the device encrypted already. If the encryption is handled by the server tho, its license does not matter in any way, they can do whatever they want with it. I know telegram has two communication modes, and if you trust the E2E one then all should be well. (I don’t know how great Telegram’s client-side encryption is)
I’m not defending Telegram here, I don’t really trust it, but all that matters in encrypted communication in general is whether the client app is secure and no sensitive data leave it unencrypted.