this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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Doesn't Ubuntu have a metric shit ton of legitimate problems these days? I thought people had mostly moved away from it as the go to distro
Yeah as far as I can tell, the current big user-friendly distros are either PopOS or Linux Mint because Ubuntu is doing the whole snap thing, and also Mint (maybe Pop too, i havent looked into that one much) is Ubuntu-based just without snap
Nope. You're just hearing the loud noises in some echo chambers. Us Ubuntu users don't have much to say because shit just works over here.
Are snaps hard to avoid?
To avoid them entirely, yes. Ubuntu ships some of its core functionality via snap. That's how it was tested, and how it will be updated for the foreseeable future. Ripping that out puts you on an untested path that you're responsible for managing. To keep things working as designed and tested, and avoid breakage, I'd leave snap alone and pretend it doesn't exist, if I wanted to avoid it.
To avoid them for your personal needs, no they're not hard to avoid. Just don't install anything yourself via Snap. Use apt, Flatpak instead. Or any other means.
Personally I use a mix of Snap and Flatpak on top of Ubuntu LTS. That keeps the base OS boring stable and provides a way to keep user apps like GIMP, Inkscape and LibreOffice up to date, without the risk of breakage that comes with PPAs. Docker's great for running services as well as many other use cases too.
Not entirely accurate. Some apt packages like firefox and chromium just install the corresponding snap.
Snap has it's use cases, but it should not be a silent substitute for .debs
Yes that's true and in my opinion perfectly fine. As a developer who's done some deb packaging work, that's how I'd migrate from a deb to snap in order to minimize breakage on upgrade, especially if I'm no longer supporting the deb. This strategy also keeps compatibility with scripts that
apt install firefoxwhich would otherwise break on upgrade from 20.04 to 22.04. It's a pretty elegant way to do it.I can see using snaps when the alternative is to break things. But mozilla team is already packaging as .deb for ubuntu available through the mozillateam ppa.
This seems to be canonical arbitrarily injecting the snap store as a dependency for firefox with no clear benefit and noticeable performance issues
I don't know who packages what and what the SLAs for each is. That is, who makes the snap, who makes the debs in the mozillateam PPA, is it the same people, are they different with different mandates. What is the security patch expectation for the snap and deb. I suspect that there's a difference there. What we know for sure is that Ubuntu comes with a security patch expectation for the packages in the base OS along with varying expectations for the packages in the different Ubuntu repositories - main, universe, multiverse, etc. The snap version of Firefox falls under this umbrella. The mozillateam PPA does not. Maybe the latter is also patched as quickly. For users who can't or don't want to think about those important details, whatever is shipped with Ubuntu is probably the safest bet, especially when we're discussing possibly the largest attack surface on end user systems - the internet browser.
Snaps have borked my device table, now lsblk lists every single fucking snap install. I will get a new SSD for my system partition, and I'll probably go with Debian. If I have to deliberately avoid an OS feature because the vendor has decided to shove it down my throat I will drop that OS like it's hot.