The most annoying thing for me was the huge internet data usage by snap updates but it is better now.
Even though it showed 300mb for a Firefox update, but only consumed 80mb and everything updated and working wonderfully ! 😅 😍 👑
The New app store is beautiful 🙌
(just sharing my experience 😅 )
I still want to be able to choose whether or not to use snaps. I don’t care how friendly they get.
I understand the sentiment. That said, you’re forced to use deb files from Ubuntu’s repositories. 🫠 There are some fundamental choices that are made for you by the OS developers. Sometimes you have more leeway, sometimes less. It’s not the first time and this isn’t the only system component people have complained about. Ultimately if a user disagrees with a choice that the OS developer has made about a system upon which the OS developer depends to ship a working system, it’s probably wiser to switch OSes than fuck around with the system.
You are correct. When on Ubuntu I tried to remove the entire snapd system but as soon as I ran an update it the system reinstalled it
So I immediately moved to Mint. And now that LMDE 6 became available I immediately moved to that. And I couldn’t be happier. Works great.
Makes sense. I’ve been pretty excited about snap on desktop since 2014-15 since it promised to deliver Android-style unbreakable software update capability that finally unlocks updating parts of the system out of band and safely. I switched to snap from all the PPAs I used in 2016. GIMP, Inkscape, etc. I think I was able to get rid of the remaining PPAs in 2018. No package breakage since then, trivial OS upgrades. My main machine has been upgraded through every LTS since 14.04. It’s glorious. Yes there were some bugs with snap itself and missing features, cough… “pending update notification” …cough, but that’s par for the course for any system under development and I’ve never seen a real showstopper so far. Flatpak is also useful of course and I do use it but it can’t do system components as far as I know.
Thank you for sharing that because you do make a great and important point about snaps, namely that they can replace unsecure PPA’s with secure Snaps. That sounds like the best argument for Snaps.
Personally I didn’t have a problem with the Snaps themselves, but the forcing me to use it cough… “Firefox” …cough…
At least have Firefox in the apt repo so people have a choice. That’s literally** what the Free Software movement is about: the user has the choice and power. Not the dev or even the machine.
It’s more of a double edged sword: snaps were great imho when they replaced the mess of old we had going on with thirty or so incompatible ppas.
But why force snaps for central stuff like FF/Chromium and soon Thunderbird?
I just upgraded an old PC and reinstalling Ubuntu meant that all my configs of these apps and then some broke. Snap is using incompatible storage for dotfiles and configurations. And more often than not central Desktop functions like the cursors (atm no hand cursor in FF for me!), sound and common extensions don’t work ootb. For the odd piece of speciality sw I’d had to go hunting for before that’s alright. But not for everyday stuff
Come on canonical, don’t enshittify you great distribution…
@jfx Yes…You’re right…
I kind of dislike the 50 bazillion mounted block devices. I’m an old gray beard at this point and I like my CLI. That’s really my only complaint about it. It just seems unnatural to me. Otherwise they’re fine mostly.
I’ve seen very similar use of loop devices in an automotive app management implementation. Each app has its own filesystem image that gets mounted on a loop device on installation, then runs from it. It’s annoying on the command line but it’s not a bad use case of the facility. ☺️
