Snapless Ubuntu

Linux@lemmy.ml – 56 points – 1 years ago

Not sure what others are doing to use Ubuntu (23.04) without snaps, but this is what I am doing:

for Firefox I found a guide here
for chromium I am actually using the Linux Mint packages (which work absolutely fine), and I have just set up a small repository I can add to apt:

deb [arch=amd64 allow-insecure=yes] http://snapless.cmeerw.net victoria upstream

this just syncs from Linux Mint and only republishes chromium in the Packages file (with downloads redirected to a Linux Mint mirror). BTW, I am not signing these...

What are others doing?

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I do nothing.

I use the Firefox snap. It takes like 800 extra milliseconds to start up on my 10y old laptop and it moves my profile dir. It otherwise impacts my life not at all and is just fine. If it ever bothers me, there PPAs, flatpak, or a dozen other ways to install Firefox that are all perfectly simple.
I install other stuff from flatpaks or PPAs or using docker.

The angst around snap is inscrutable to me. There are 30 million easy ways to install software and they all work on Ubuntu. There is nothing in my life that's easier to ignore than snap.

I'm basically doing the same, but those "pending update, close the app to avoid disruptions" popups are kind of disrupting.

... those "pending update, close the app to avoid disruptions" popups are kind of disrupting.

I don't exactly disagree that it's slightly irritating but:

No one declares war on an operating system the way snap haters have over a "restart to update" message. It's an irritation, but it's not an irritation proportional to the response snap gets out of people.
Restarting to enable an update or complete an update is not something unique to snap. Except for a tiny number of very advanced live-patching systems like the one some kernel updaters use, every updater either nags you to shutdown to do the update, nags you to restart to finish the update, or doesn't nag you and the update just doesn't take effect till you restart (apt falls in this category and it's not unambiguously better than nagging because you're silently vulnerable when security patches are shipped until you restart). So again, this is just an extremely unremarkable thing that tons of updaters deal with similarly.

True facts

Very true and good points, and when it comes to snap I mostly agree with you. I would guess the "war on Ubuntu" going on is more due to Ubuntu's history of making controversial decisions that go against the grain of what most other distros are doing at the time (creating and dropping Mir, creating Unity instead of using GNOME and then switching back to GNOME when they finally got Unity working well, installing an Amazon app out of the box in one version), many of which angered a lot of Linux community members before who are still angry despite Ubuntu rolling back most of those decisions, and they've found snap a great current scapegoat issue to use to vent their long-standing frustrations with Ubuntu at.

EDIT: I also notice to a lesser degree a weird fanboy-ism around Flatpak which I think also contributes to it. Pretty much when Flatpak came out the attitude was, "this is the standard for containerized binaries, no alternatives or exceptions will be tolerated", and immediately they went on the warpath to destroy both snap and appimage (though to be fair appimage really isn't great).

Very true and good points, and when it comes to snap I mostly agree with you. I would guess the "war on Ubuntu" going on is more due to Ubuntu's history of making controversial decisions that go against the grain of what most other distros are doing at the time (creating and dropping Mir, creating Unity instead of using GNOME and then switching back to GNOME when they finally got Unity working well, installing an Amazon app out of the box in one version), many of which angered a lot of Linux community members before who are still angry despite Ubuntu rolling back most of those decisions, and they've found snap a great current scapegoat issue to use to vent their long-standing frustrations with Ubuntu at.

I agree with just about every word here. I lived through all this stuff. Mir and Unity were hugely disruptive to the OSS desktop community beyond Ubuntu and I was as salty about them as anyone. If someone is aware of this history and just fucking done with Ubuntu's bullshit they'll get no flak from me. I rarely see this coherent an argument made though, it's much more often "snap bad, use this other distro that's downstream of Ubuntu and shares all the same foundations but has a different default desktop and disables snap by default", which I think is pretty nonsense and is rampant in the comments of this post.

But I've done my share of distro hopping and if someone wants to use something else for any reason or no reason... more power to them. I will make the counterpoint that no one has to care about snap specifically and if you just pretend it doesn't exist then your life will be no different. And if history is any indicator, snap has about 2y left before they abandon it anyway.

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