I see people hate snap packaging and removing it if their OS support it. Is it because it’s NOT fully open-source or just due to how the technology works?

Update: fixed typos

  • voodooattack@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Here’s my answer to this same question from an old thread on Reddit:

    My Ubuntu system always reserved a whopping 20% of my 32GB ram for no reason and I never bothered to know why. Later I uninstalled snapd because of boot time issues and guess what happened? Only 1.5 GB used after a fresh boot.

    I had like 4 different JetBrains IDEs installed via snap with each totalling around 2GB of disk space. While removing snapd I discovered it kept back 2-3 previous versions of every package on your disk.

    Uninstalling this bloat was the best thing I did to my ubuntu system. It was suddenly light as a feather and way more responsive like I just did a fresh system install.

    Some time later I was installing something from apt and Ubuntu tried to install it from snap, thus sneakily installing snapd in the process. Looking for a solution, I felt like I was looking up how to disable Windows updates or some other shit.

    I had a moment of clarity and wondered why the fuck did I have to put up with this kinda bullshit on Linux. I wiped that drive clean and switched to Fedora.

    • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      I wiped that drive clean and switched to Fedora.

      I might need to switch over as well, but I really don’t like rpm (or whatever that’s called on fedora, zypper or something? or was that suse?). I’ve been a Debian user since woody was a new thing and then at some point I gradually moved to ubuntu due to better desktop experience and more up to date packages (back then Debian stable really wasn’t anywhere close of bleeding edge) and PPA support was great for my needs. Now I have ubuntu installations which have gone trough upgrades for years and installations I have doesn’t seem to work like I want them to. Some of the issues will most likely stay (as RMS said, nvidia rapes babies or something like that) but in general I don’t like my browser, signal client and whatnot to notify me that I need to shut them down NOW since they’ll upgrade at some point in next 3-6 months. Simple apt dist-upgrade isn’t enough anymore and the systems require more and more TLC than I’m willing to give to them. Snapd is at least related to the issues I have 8 times out of 10.

      Ubuntu just doesn’t have the feel it used to and it’s getting annoying enough that the simpler way would be just to reinstall everything and switch to something else, even if it takes some time and effort to migrate 5+ year old installations to new system.

      • mundane@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        If you don’t want something completely different, PopOS is a great, snap free, distribution based on Ubuntu. It’s what Ubuntu should have been.

        • phx@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          Mint also packages stuff that Ubuntu has rolled into snaps

      • Mx Phibb@reddthat.com
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        1 year ago

        Maybe LM:DE (Linux Mint: Debian Edition)? Obscure software can be a pain to install for the usual reason, but otherwise I’m finding this to be a great distro. Second choice is Solus, but that’s even worse when it comes to software.

        • FakeJake@fr3diver.se
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          1 year ago

          Or even just Linux Mint (non-debian edition). I’ve moved to that as it’s a familiar Ubuntu base but without snaps.

      • SillyBanana@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Fedora uses DNF, with rpms under the hood, not sure how that works, haha. Honestly I have no problems with it. I’m no power user, but it does everything I need. The only downside being kinda slow repo fetches.

        • phoenix591@lemmy.phoenix591.com
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          1 year ago

          dnf is to apt as rpm is to dpkg.

          The first pair are the nice user friendly front ends that pull things in and install from the repos.

          The latter are the guts that directly handle the raw packages and are used by the frontends.

        • oktoberpaard@feddit.nl
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          1 year ago

          The next release of Fedora will ship DNF5 as the default package manager, which is supposed to be much faster.

      • animist@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        rpms were a pain for me when i transitioned as well but I’ve learned to love them

    • Squidious@lemm.eeB
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      1 year ago

      One of my biggest gripes about Windows was updates, virus scans and compatibility scans running autonomously while I am trying to get stuff done, sucking up network, drive access and CPU. I didn’t need Ubuntu doing the same thing to me - I want to kick off updates manually when I am taking a break for lunch or at the end of the day before shutdown.

      • InFerNo@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        As a power use this drives me nuts, but I know plenty of end users who are better off with those things turned on.

    • minorsecond@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I actually think jetbrains are the ones keeping old versions. On my windows machine, when I get an ide update, the old one is saved so I can revert back to it.

  • tiny@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    There are philosophical and technical reasons to not like snaps

    Technical

    • Slow startup time
    • Makes lsblk look really ugly
    • For awhile users didn’t have a lot of control over when things updated
    • Not designed to work with third party repos by default
    • Requires apparmor so it doesn’t work well on selinux distros.

    Philosophical

    • Backend is proprietary and controller by a single company
    • Has made the same amount of effort as flatpak to work on distros that aren’t Ubuntu
    • Some people just don’t like Ubuntu
  • enoent@lemmy.ilwwbs.com
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    1 year ago

    This threads got lots of good answers, but I haven’t seen it mentioned that snaps sometimes mean reduced functionality.

    Use the docker snap? Sorry, it can only access your home directory so no -v /some/path:/somewhere for you

    Use firefox or chromium and keepassxc? Sorry, your browser plugin won’t be able to talk to your password manager

    And the updates… dear god. In whose mind was it a good idea to show a “firefox is updating, exit now to avoid issues” TWO WEEKS im advance. Closing the app does precisely fuck all unless you manually snap refresh it

    Containerised applications are a fine idea, but snap is a horrible implementation of it

    • VerbTheNoun95@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      Didn’t know that about the docker snap but that is insane. It would be straight up unusable at work for me.

    • Fubarberry@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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      1 year ago

      To be fair, those are both issues with flatpak too. You can change the file system permissions with a command or flatseal, but I don’t know of a fix for the password extension issue.

      • Infiltrated_ad8271@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        In general the integration of flatpak is quite good (even more if we compare it with snap), but there are still some gaps. In this case there are some solutions like this one.

    • deejay4am@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I tried to get microk8s up and running by installing it from a snap since I figured it would be a nice and easy way to get up and running quickly.

      I’ve spent so much time trying to get it working that I haven’t even started to learn k8s yet since I can’t get the damn thing to run.

      I think I’m switching to Debian for my servers.

    • 1337@1337lemmy.com
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      1 year ago

      Ha I was just listening to the Linux Unplugged podcast and the guy was just complaining about this same thing

    • cmeerw@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      I wonder if that could easily be fixed by just filtering the output of df to not show virtual disks (df already has an -l option to only show local disks, so would expect that changing df could be relatively easy).

      Note: I am not saying that I like snaps…

    • Jagger2097@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It seems incredibly shortsighted to go this way. Sure 1 or 2 is fine, but when the whole os is snaps it’s abusing the system.

    • pazukaza@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Just create an alias that filters loop devices. I mean, if this is your only problem with snap, you can fix it in a second. But I’m betting you have other problems with it.

  • MonkeyLord@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I don’t know enough to dislike snaps, I’m just spiteful enough to dislike cannonical trying to force me to use them

  • fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk
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    1 year ago

    Perhaps it’s been fixed since, but a this type of thing was the main issue with snaps to me:

    “Why can’t the program see the printer? Ubuntu can see the printer”

    “Why can’t I save to this USB pen? It can’t even see it”

    “These two programs are meant to work together, but they can’t see each other”

    “I can’t open my project from my external drive”

    “It won’t let me import the photos from my camera. It can’t see the camera”

    Would have been less of an issue if they had an android-style permissions pop-up with each incident, but snaps just left you silently failing.

    • violetraven@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      This was the most frustrating for me as well. While I appreciate Snap trying to be a universal installer of sorts, it breaks too often to be useful.

    • joshhsoj1902@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      This was my experience too. Ubuntu asks if I want to install the docker snap, I say sure. I then try to use docker and it’s completely unable to do what I need. I then need to figure out how to uninstall the snap and then install docker normally.

      I tried a few snaps, but everytime they were a pain in the ass and I regretted it. Now I avoid them at all costs

      • LiamSora@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        Same with Docker. Installed it because Ubuntu recommended it then spent a month trying to figure out why all my docker containers would randomly shutdown and restart themselves. I knew snap auto-installed updates, but had no idea it would do it even if the program was currently running and in use.

    • RickyRigatoni@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      There is absolutely such a thing as too much sandboxing, and flatpak is already pushing the limit.

  • JoYo@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Because I can’t dismiss the Firefox update notification, no matter how many times I update it.

    I’ve had to reboot every time.

    Which, way to go you’ve reimplemented windows xp era updates.

    • phx@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Stop the app and run “snap refresh” and it should update anything that’s queued

      • JoYo@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        yes, I did kill the process and update the image though snap.

        this did nothing to remove the update notification that cannot be dismissed without rebooting.

        • phx@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          Oh, weird. The notification itself disappeared for me when I click it (KDE)

          • JoYo@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            maybe they fixed it, I switched to Debian over a year ago.

  • mrmanager@lemmy.today
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    1 year ago

    I remember when the snap version of calculator took like 12 seconds to launch and Canonical were like “yeah but what’s the big deal?”.

    It basically turns your super fast Linux into feeling like a 10 year old windows machine.

    I hear they have improved performance now though but there are many other reasons why snap suck.

    • vampatori@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      I hear they have improved performance now though

      It’s still not great. Better, but still slow enough to make you question whether you’ve actually launched the app or not.

  • igorlogius@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    tldr;

    canonical …

    1. keepes the snap store closed source and all snap packages and distribution under their control
    2. “silently” replaces packages (like firefox) with their snap versions
    3. will completly remove support for alternatives (like flatpak)
    • mosiacmango@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      They don’t respect your setting on OS version updates either.

      I was running 22.04 with the firefox ppa, but the minute i shifted from 22.04 lts to 22.10, they reinstalled the firefox snap and a bunch of new ones as well. Ive purged them all again, but it looks like every update will bw this same fight. I ahoulsnt have to write an ansible playbook to fight my OS vendor.

      Debain 12 with flatpac to fill the gaps is looking better and better by the day.

      • igorlogius@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        They don’t respect your setting on OS version updates

        I was running 22.04 with the firefox ppa, but the minute i shifted from 22.04 lts to 22.10, they reinstalled the firefox snap and a bunch of new ones as well.

        Seems like canonical wants to be the only software distributor for their OS. Wouldn’t suprise me if they completely disabled the option to install other repos and DEB packages soon.

        Debain 12 with flatpac to fill the gaps is looking better and better by the day.

        agreed

        • RickyRigatoni@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Wasn’t there an article posted here that the next ubuntu update won’t have deb support at first and it’ll come later? 100% chance they decide to be an immutable snap-based distro in the near future.

      • LiveLM@lemmy.zip
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        1 year ago

        Disrespecting preferences, having to fight the OS… hm, where have I heard that before? 🤔

  • Synthead@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Along with the other comments, imagine if people started to say, “I like Linux but it’s too slow and bloated, so I upgraded to Windows 11.”

  • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    At best it works more or less the same as an ordinary package. It only gets worse from there.

    Several times I’ve been stuck on a broken version of Discord because on the server side they force an update to the new client, and the new client has not been packaged as a Snap yet.

    Getting native hosts to work in Firefox is possible, but a giant pain in the butt.

    Basically anything that needs filesystem access is unreasonably troublesome. I gave up on getting Snaps to work with my external drives.

    There is simply no scenario where I think “wow, I sure am glad this was packaged as a Snap!” There have been many scenarios where I thought “god dammit why is this a Snap?!”

    • ffhein@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Several times I’ve been stuck on a broken version of Discord because on the server side they force an update to the new client, and the new client has not been packaged as a Snap yet.

      To be fair this is more of an issue with Discord than snap… Would be understandable if it was an urgent security fix but they do it every time, and then it breaks for everybody who is using anything else than the deb or tar.gz they provide.

      Workaround for Fedora: Edit /usr/lib64/discord/resources/build_info.json and increase the version number to whatever Discord tells you is the new version. And hope that the update wasn’t a fix for some remote code execution vulnerability :)

  • animist@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    because the snap folder in your home directory by default starts with a lowercase letter while all the other folders start with uppercase (hidden folders don’t count)

    all other reasons are secondary

    • UlrikHD@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      Downloads and Documents starting with a capital letter is my biggest pet peeve with Ubuntu. It makes it a lot more annoying to navigate through them than if it was all lower case.

  • j4k3@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Snaps have centralized control. Canonical has to approve a snap package. Flatpak is like most of Linux. Anyone can make a Flatpak. Also, in my experience, Snaps had a lot of issues early on that were not present in Flatpaks. Now, Flatpak dominates and Snaps kinda feel like a irrelevant runner in a race long after the officials closed competition packed it up and went home.

  • Raphael@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Hmmm, can we just sticky a “snaps are bad” thread? I like to see activity but this same question keeps getting asked.

    Also sticky Red Hat’s “response”, it should deter most of the neolibs.