News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it by kikoreis on Saturday May 02, 2020 @10:48PM (#23056524)
The challenge is that a) we don't really want to (can't afford to, etc) maintain a forked package for everything which comes in snaps and b) snaps are really, really, much better for publishing and maintaining certain classes of application, in particular complex ones with hundreds of dependencies and a massive surface area, like a web browser. And users want web browsers, so the default is to include snaps.

In general, you can opt of snaps entirely and `apt-get remove snapd`, but you'll miss out on potentially critical components that are only available via snaps.

Re:Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it by 8bitsrule on Sunday May 03, 2020 @01:00AM (#23056961)
If there are ever any 'potentially critical components ... only available via snaps', many of us will bail to distros that don't have that weakness.

I don't use, but see the advantages of such packaging. But auto-updating software (FOSS or blob) brings-in it's own barrel of concerns. In the event of something 'critical', a -message- alerting the user ... who can then research and decide ... is far preferable.

Re:Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it by zentiggr on Sunday May 03, 2020 @01:31AM (#23057061)
I've not used Ubuntu but was about to search for a distro to put on a rebuild machine... I was considering Ubuntu up until I heard about this.

As a former Gentoo user, this whole Snap concept is a huge deal-breaker. I wouldn't consider Ubuntu for anything other than some thin-client/smart terminal/kiosk usage, and I'd still be wary of what gets pushed and what sort of potential holes might get opened.

> but you'll miss out on potentially critical components that are only available via snaps

REALLY shitty move.

Re:Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it by craftinator on Sunday May 03, 2020 @01:23PM (#23060425)
> I wouldn't consider Ubuntu for anything other than some thin-client/smart terminal/kiosk usage

Until the snap maintainer of Qt decides to upgrade you out of version compliance with your compositor and... Well, hope your kiosk doesn't do anything critical...

Re:Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it by craftinator on Sunday May 03, 2020 @01:17PM (#23060383)
You mention that snaps are really well suited for installing and updating large surface applications like web browsers. Then you say that by removing snapd you will opt out of critical components. If Canonical is using snaps for large third party applications so their maintainers can push updates without user intervention, why would it EVER use snaps for critical components? Like, wtf is that? If something is critical to my system, I need to decide when it is modified. The maintainers can't possibly know when that's okay. Using snaps for anything important is a serious regression.
Re:Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it by martinmunk on Saturday May 02, 2020 @11:44PM (#23056711)
I'd argue you can't just "apt-get remove snapd", when you push transitional apt packages that depends on snapd.

I understand the argument with browsers, but that does not justify the default on ubuntu-server. LXD being Snap-only really feels like force-feeding Snap.