Linux Mint Dumps Ubuntu Snap
I dumped Ubuntu over Snap. Maybe I’m just ignorant but it seems like allowing developers to push software updates without any review invites the same sorts of issues we’ve seen on npm, with very high risks for certain use cases. I don’t want that kind of relationship with my OS, forced updates are why I ditched Windows in the first place.
Aside from the philosophical concerns I ran into a lot of glitches with various snap packages, frequently resulting in lost or corrupted data. And the sandbox approach prevented certain filesystem tweaking I previously took for granted. Overall I didn’t see the benefit and didn’t have time to futz with it.
I’m curious if there are any distros with a recent version of Gnome and also a sane package manager.
Hundreds of organizations, including ours, rely on Rocket.Chat for their internal messaging. It all went down when a release was pushed and snap decided to auto-update [1] I can imagine it resulted in a huge loss of productivity at all these orgs in the Covid era.
Just learnt from this thread that apt-install will install snap! I'm running Ubuntu 18.04 + i3 (Dell Developer Edition) but will change to Debian.
This appears to be an unpopular opinion, but I like snaps and Canonical's philosophy in some ways mimics that of Apple's where they care about usability over configurability.
Snaps have been my preferred method of installation for a few years now. I really like how I know where the files are being installed to and if I uninstall the software it will be removed cleanly. I also like how for most software snaps contain the latest release of the software which has not been my experience with distro specific apt repos. I can even install beta, nightly or previous releases very easily using snap store channels. I've never experienced any package manager on any OS that has made it this easy.
I've also developed about a half dozen snaps, some of them were open source contributions to existing software, others were my closed-source projects and one was some contract work for a third party who wanted to snap their existing software for easier distribution. And although there were some pain points, I found the process and YAML based manifest file to be far better than most tools.
My only gripe with snaps at this time is that there is no system like PPAs so if you want to use snaps for your privately distributed app then you need to do it through Canonical and more advanced control features will cost you extra.
The main reason why I use Linux for some of my work is reproducibility. A docker image with the same apt packages installed in it will work the same every time.
Snap breaks this. A snap package can update itself whenever it wants and then you the user are just screwed when things don't work together anymore. So in effect, snap breaks the main benefit of Linux for deployment and the reason why I use Linux in the first place.
Every since they started with ads and affiliate links, I've been sceptical of Ubuntu. But Ubuntu 18 is still used as the base image for many docker deployments. I predict that this will change with Ubuntu 20, exactly because the snaps have made Ubuntu 20 unusable for reliable docker deployments.
I'm glad that mint is stepping in to provide a viable alternative.
It's interesting how many distros built on top of Ubuntu are explicitly dropping snaps or throwing their support behind flatpaks:
- Linux Mint
- ElementaryOS
- Pop!_OS
Take a hint, Canonical. You guys made some great strides towards being less silo'd by dropping Unity and Mir in favor of vanilla GNOME + Wayland, but you're still all-in on snaps for some reason. Are the handful of proprietary software companies that want an easier installer for Linux really worth it?
> Mint never shipped snapd, Snap's daemon program or any snaps, but moving ahead, in Linux Mint 20, "Chromium won't be an empty package which installs snapd behind your back. It will be an empty package, which tells you why it's empty and tells you where to look to get Chromium yourself." Further, APT will forbid snapd from installing.
Can't they just replace the Chromimum package with the one in Debian?
snap has problems that exist for years.
It will upgrade a running application without telling the user. Then it will remount all folders in use by the running application in read only mode. As such, your chromium will start misbehaving, crashing, extensions will start failing, it won't save cookies or remember tabs after restart. DBeaver won't be saving your .sql scripts. Snap developers think users are precogs. That users without any foreshadowing will close application before snap silently upgrades it behind the scenes.
Also Snap does really weird things as a container. I run multiple VPNs each within own network namespace. So something as simple as :
as root: ip netns exec myVPN chromium fails with execv failed: Permission denied
Both of these problems exists for years.
We've only had problems with snap so far, constantly. Kudos to Mint for doing the right thing for their users.
Many applications packaged under Snap are still unusable on Fedora and Arch because Snap has a bug that renders tofu characters (□□□) instead of text:
https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/snapped-app-not-loading-fonts-o...
I'm not sure whether Linux Mint is also affected by this issue, but it's clear that Canonical doesn't perform quality assurance for Snap on any Linux distribution other than Ubuntu.
I've been using Mint now for several years and been satisfied with it. I was afraid that the Ubuntu's snap mishegas would force me to move elsewhere, but this is the message I was hoping to hear from the Mint team.
Snap for me means Firefox suddenly says “I won’t open a new tab until you update me and I will drop all tabs on restart”. It also means cached content and configs in many new obscure places. It doesn’t mean any visible improvement so far. So hey, kudos Mint and hey, Ubuntu stop that already.
My number one complaint about Snaps is that they're not portable (despite being labelled "universal packages for Linux"): they start to work less well outside of Ubuntu, and they don't work at all unless you're running systemd. I find this slightly ridiculous given that Flatpaks really do work more universally - they don't require systemd - and they come out of Red Hat - the home of systemd.
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is currently super popular for servers. Any thoughts on whether 20.04 is a worthy upgrade for servers, or just a pain? Snaps in particular sound good for desktops but not servers.
I personally don't packaging apps in a sandbox, its a violation of the basic idea of writing tools that do one thing well. Still, snap gets lots of flack, but I don't see the same for flatpak. Is there some advantage to flatpak that I am missing, or is it just than Ubuntu has pushed snaps too hard?
Pop OS [1] does something similar. Based on Ubuntu, but replaces snap with flatpak. You can apt-get packages like chromium from their PPA [2].
I'm very pleased with their developer centric approach. They also apply very nice UI tweaks, a tiling WM and a useful set of gnome extensions. Loving it.
From reading the other comments, people just don't like having security updates done automatically - they'd like to have more control when they are performed.
Kind of like in Windows, where your computer suddenly shuts down to apply a service pack while you were in the middle of an important World of Warcraft raid that you were planning for weeks.
There's always a trade-off between keeping your system secure and being available. Most people don't like to trade off availability, and it makes sense.
While I'm not super up on these newfangled app distribution systems, I've had mostly negative experiences with both Snaps and Flatpaks.
As someone that administrates a small handful of workstations and a server or two, I just don't get what these tools buy me. It seems that usually installing an application via one of these methods has negative externalities (e.g. some things not working out of box, like access to user file, or ability to play audio), or most often the applications simply don't work at all.
If snaps were able to work properly out of the box, they could be good if they reduce the work for the packagers. That said, I've burned enough of my time trying to debug broken snaps that I won't entertain ever using them again.
I guess if it works for someone else's use case though, that's nice. However it sure seems pretty grubby to install a snap when the user clearly intended to install an DEB package via aptitude.
I will say, I've had very positive experiences with AppImage. I haven't really dug into the technical details of how these different approaches work yet, since I haven't had any reason to, but every AppImage I've wanted to use has always worked perfectly.
Users who like both can use both (Mint and Ubuntu any flavor). If you don't want to use Snaps in Ubuntu, you can just uninstall snapd (first thing I did). EOL.
Mint had already pretty-much committed to flatpak years ago, so this came as no surprise. Clem's said there'll be a way to install Chromium. Tempest in a dongle.
I noticed that Mint is working on LMDE which uses Debian as its base directly without using Ubuntu; I wonder if this is one of the reasons motivating that project and what the other reasons are.
> It's more empowering developers to get their packages into users' hands very fast. They don't need to worry about the distribution."
And this is why it's a double edged sword. I like packages to be validated by maintainers. I don't want a new Telegram app update every day. Just now it broke and I have to wait until the developer pushes the new build to the snap repo.
It's like it's suddenly okay that everything needs to be rolling release.If I want that, I'll use arch.
I have found flatpaks to be much better (they are much faster to startup), except that flatpak doesn't have an unconfined or "classic" mode like snaps. THis is especially annoying if you wanted to install vscode to access the system compiler, python, etc.
On that matter: did the snaps finally fix the situation where you had some of your mounts in non-standard places and you could not open files from there due to security settings?
Tip: if you're wondering what SNAP apps are already installed in your system:
ls -l /var/lib/snapd/snapsManjaro with Xmonad is a nice desktop.
While I understand the concerns over Snap, you can't blame Canonical for trying, because lets be honest, rpm/deb packages are a mess.
I see in the comments a complaint that you don't want the developers upgrading their apps whenever they want ... really? Because that's my number one complaint for debs/rpms too. You can't install specific versions, you can't install multiple versions side by side and installing a newer version of one package can break your system due to its dependencies. Snaps can't possibly be worse than this and they aren't.
And on the server-side I understand wanting to review each updated package, but on your laptop, how often does one do that anyway?
For the general population automatic upgrades are a net win. The same moaning happened when Firefox switched, following Chrome, to automatic updates and fast releases and people now love that, including me. You trusted the app developers as soon as you installed that app on your computer with full privileges. And most apps don't have reproducible builds, even if the app is open source, trusting the binary you're installing is also a leap of faith. Unless the OS can sandbox that app, installing any app is about trust in a brand and faith. And debs aren't sandboxed.
When I switched to MacOS, 6 years ago, I missed Ubuntu's repository, I hated Homebrew, I hated installing apps by copying them from volumes mounted from .dmg files. But not anymore. I rarely have issues now. Experience could be improved of course, I sometimes want versioning, I want reproducible environments, which is why I'm experimenting with Nix (see https://nixos.org/). The first thing I did on a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 LTS box, couple of months back? I searched for "Firefox Developer Edition" and failed to find a PPA for it or a beta channel that seems to be up to date.
Speaking of which, people complain about Snap being insecure, however I've never seen an Ubuntu/Debian workstation that doesn't make use of insecure PPAs.
Also packaging apps via DEB files is hard. I tried building DEBs for my server-side apps, but unless the process is automated via tools that are not language/platform agnostic, I found it hard, with documentation severely lacking.
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This is one big reason for why Docker is now the preferred distribution mechanism for self-hosted apps on Linux servers. It's very easy to create a Dockerfile and the result won't infect your system with crap.
I have yet to try out Snaps, maybe some of the critiques are warranted, but it can't possibly be worse than the status quo. The only problem, a major one, is that yet again we've got no agreement between vendors. But that's sadly the Linux ecosystem, a genuine Tower of Babel.
down w/ canonical
Thank you Mint
Snaps are a poor solution for the problem apt already solved years ago.
I can understand Canonical pushing for snaps. It's their product and they want it to succeed.
That said I hate their dirty ways. I find it even morally wrong. How can "sudo apt install chromium-browser" not install the apt package but install instead a snap? How I, as a user and also as a professional, trust Ubuntu if when I use their package manager I'm being tricked?
I don't use Windows for a reason, more than one actually. I've been using Ubuntu even with all the "weird" stuff Canonical has been doing over the years but I think this is the nail in the coffin.
Right now I'm using 20.04 but as soon as I finish some work I have left I'll install a fresh new distro.