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Comment by nromiun | Hacker News Reader

> Snap applications auto-update and that’s fine if Ubuntu wants to keep systems secure. But it can’t even be turned off manually.

OMG. Is this real? This is the exact reason I use Linux instead of Windows 10 or macOS. I am not a grandma who can't stay up to date on tech news. At the least there should be a toggle for power users. But no, you can only defer it. Am I the only one who doesn't like it when your already slow internet slows down even further? It feels like hell when you are working.

I am not upgrading to this. I have been using Arch Linux as my personal OS. Maybe I should look into Debian for my VMs.

And just read this thread[1]. Is this how they treat their users? Even Reddit is better then this.

1. https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/is-ubuntu-software-going-to-b...

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We work at remote sites on cell connections. Part of the reason we moved to Ubuntu from Windows was the ability to control data usage, which is expensive. Automatic updates quickly become a significant slice of the bill when random decisions like these get pushed on users. Ubuntu was supposed to help prevent us from needing to chase this.

Exactly. It seems like these days everyone assumes you are on a stable broadband connection. In many parts of the world getting a fast and stable internet connection is literally impossible.

Did you tick the metered connection box?

This is from the blog.

> Even on metered connections, snaps auto-update anyway after some time.

pop_os should fit the bill. Based in ubuntu, with a better UI, and has flatpack support and added polish

I have a much, much better idea of what process is using network traffic or other resources on Linux than on Windows (I don't know how often tracing tools pointed fingers at the "system" process for weird magic like CPU or network usage). Unless you mean the 20.04 LTS thing specifically (it sounds like you had this issue for longer), it should be exceedingly easy to turn off anything that runs automatically.

Windows 10 has an out of the box feature to mark connections as metered which disables automatic updates.

On Ethernet which ultimately has a cellular uplink?

Yes, but this is something that needs to be set.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4028458/windows-met...

Yes, you can set it on any connection. It can also be set as a group policy.

> which disables automatic updates.

Except for the ones Microsoft thinks are really important to push to you.

Really? I spent a year with that on (satellite for awhile, then 4g lye data) and never saw an update automatically go through.

Based on the discussion linked in the article Ubuntu does as well.

Windows lets you set your network connection as metered, and doing so prevents it from applying automatic updates.

I recently switched back to linux myself, but there are certain utilities and conveniences and options in Windows that linux distros don't yet provide, and ubuntu definitely is not meant to be light weight in any sense of the term. Is switching to something else an option at this point?

I think part of the problem is that many newish users equate Linux with Ubuntu, good and bad. There are many other options and Ubuntu should not be the default anymore.

You aren't wrong, but I hate to say it... there are a lot of things that Ubuntu got right, and generally speaking derivatives of Ubuntu almost always work without any extra fiddling or driver hunting for me.

An experienced user could probably find a nicely tuned arch / manjaro setup to work better for them than Ubuntu, but if someone is just first getting their toes wet and learning, Ubuntu isn't a bad recommendation for a first go-round.

I've tried several Linux distros, but always go back to Ubuntu as it tends to work with the least fuss. Still a lot of fuss compared to Windows and Mac for desktop software, but less for development, so it balances out. Ubuntu 20.04 is super snappy (catch the pun?) and really has been working well for me. I strongly recommend it. It feels like a new computer.

My experience is the exact opposite, I recently built a desktop, the motherboard is ASUS ROG STRIX Z390 GAMING, despite all my efforts, Ubuntu wasn't able to even boot, While Fedora not only booted, but was "super snappy"

FWIW, for this very reason, there is refresh.metered=hold, as I note in my comment earlier in the thread.

Will setting `refresh.metered=hold` prevent snap updates indefinitely?

Can I mark all my network connections as metered?

I'm not sure how refresh.metered behaves when there is a network device change, but I assume it will, yes.

And I'm pretty sure NM lets you set all network connections metered, i.e.

  nmcli connection modify $CONNECTION connection.metered yes

See https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/364927/networkmanag...

Someone on reddit stated that snapd will update snaps regardless of what value `refresh.metered` holds when updates are postponed long enough. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to verify whether this claim is true or false.

Canonical should be up front about this type of information.

I agree entirely. Unavoidable updates were one of the key factors in my choice to avoid Windows 10 for business-critical computing. I standardized on Ubuntu instead, but this could be a deal-breaker for me.

I hope Canonical fixes this immediately. I'm not eager to spend time re-researching to market for a suitable OS.

Just disable snapd after you have achieved your ideal configuration. But yes, this should be a setting somewhere...

Thanks, that's helpful.

Another huge differentiator for Ubuntu over Windows was that I didn't think the OS vendor was trying to seize control of my computer. Canonical jeopardized that trust with this choice. I truly hope they take steps to restore it. I don't want the added work of switching OSs.

The problem with that is you are fighting the platform. That's not a great place to be. Unless your disagreement with the platform's design is small enough you are likely to be better choosing a more appropriate platform.

I'm currently on Kubuntu 19.10. I don't have any snaps. So they can't autoupdate. BTW: After installation of Kubuntu there were automatic security updates. But it was possible to turn these off in the Muon Package Manager (Settings | Software Sources | Updates | Automatic Updates)

I tried to uninstall snapd on 18.04 and it broke the desktop.

I tried to disable it from systemd, but it had some weird way of relaunching itself.

just do a web search on disabling snapd to see how many people want to do this.

PopOS is probably the closest... unless they pull the feature from 2020 into their main branch.

+1 Insightful.

> GNOME Calculator was put on the ISO as a snap to help us test the whole “seeding snaps” process, not because it was a fast-moving, CVE-prone applications. Chromium, Firefox and LibreOffice fall more into that category.

Ok so the whole snap thing comes down to updating browsers. Is this for real? I want the web, not the browser to change daily, or to consume more bandwidth than my www usage :)

The browser is actually the number one component you should update as soon as a security fix comes out. If you don't want new features ("more free stuff!"), use an LTS version that only includes the security updates?

You can note the version everyone is complaining about here _is_ the LTS.

You mean the Ubuntu LTS, I meant a browser's LTS version (a sibling comment just mentioned it's called ESR in Firefox instead of LTS... I meant the concept, not the specific name for Firefox, but my bad) so that you don't keep getting browser feature updates but only get the backported fixes.

> The browser is actually the number one component you should update as soon as a security fix comes out.

The problem is that there is no way to have a browser that only pushes updates for security fixes. They're always mixed in with changes to the UI that force people to re-learn workflows.

> If you don't want new features ("more free stuff!"), use an LTS version that only includes the security updates?

There is no such thing. I run Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on all my computers at home and I'm posting this on, IIRC, the fifth or sixth new version of Firefox I've had to accept (and that's only counting major version changes), because, as noted above, there was no way to just get the security updates and leave out the others.

>The problem is that there is no way to have a browser that only pushes updates for security fixes

Yes there is, it's called firefox esr.

Interesting, I'll take a look.

That... doesn't make sense. Chrome and Firefox (and possibly Chromium, I'm uncertain there) already can update out-of-band of apt/etc.

The idea is that the vendor can take care of the updates without having to go through all the package management system of all distributions

When you install Google Chrome for a deb, it's already set to update through Google's own apt repository. Presumably Firefox could do the same.

> Presumably Firefox could do the same.

At least when I encountered it a few years ago, if you go to Help -> About Firefox in the menu, it'll check for updates in the background, download the most recent version, and upgrade itself the next time you restarted the browser.

And yes, this was on Ubuntu.

So the capability is there, even if it's not on generally.

Which is really frustrating as a user; I don't want to wait 5 seconds for a calculator to launch; it's a simple app, it should launch instantly, like it does on any other Linux distro.

There are people working on Ubuntu with tons of dubious ideas. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the one that sealed its doom.

Point taken on the shoddy behaviour, but if you'd like to try it out there's this helpful post on disabling snap[1] shared here[2] when I installed 20.04. Quick and painless!

1. https://www.kevin-custer.com/blog/disabling-snaps-in-ubuntu-...

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22972661

*Edited

At that point I'll just use Debian.

Debian used not to work easily on hardware that require proprietary drivers, did it change recently ?

I left Ubuntu almost ten years ago, after 5 years of using it, when they started using MIR instead of Gnome2 and I replaced it with Linux Mint and I haven't looked back. This whole snap thing looks like the new weird decision made by Canonical to make their faithful users leave :/

Nvidia has been easy on debian for quite some time now, are there other proprietary drivers that are important?

If you have proprietary drivers, you'll need to prepare a USB stick with them downloaded onto it. They won't be on the installer image.

On my older 2011-era laptop, that's the wifi and wired network that need those drivers. It's a bit of a pain.

Generally it's not the drivers but the firmware for those devices, i.e. code that runs inside the device.

I think it's an over-zealous position from Debian not to redistribute firmware. Even systems that are very strict about licensing, like OpenBSD, redistribute firmware, because they have some common sense.

Debian does, in fact, distribute firmware. They are just careful to ensure that you are getting it deliberately, and not accidentally.

Yeah they should do that with the libc, keyboard drivers, etc. as well.

> I think it's an over-zealous position from Debian not to redistribute firmware. Even systems that are very strict about licensing, like OpenBSD, redistribute firmware, because they have some common sense.

OTOH I believe it's a position fully aligned with their ethical standpoint. Equating common sense with your personal preference isn't very gracious.

If you want something that's less zealous about respecting (and eschewing) stupid licensing, but is more zealous about randomly upgrading all your software packages unexpectedly, there's always Ubuntu.

I don't see how it aligns with their ethical standpoint. Firmware is just a blob you load into the device. The alternative is to have it already burned into ROM.

What exactly do you achieve by refusing to load it? Are you more free in one case and not the other?

If you feel it could be better documented than:

https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware

you could perhaps offer to update that page to remove the ambiguities you believe exist.

That page does not really offer any explanation.

For all intents and purposes, firmware is like a key or a password you must supply to the device to make it work. The driver, which is indeed open-source, just says: "here, device, is the firmware you need". That's it. You are not achieving anything useful at all by making people go through some ceremony to download it separately. Maybe they just want to send the signal that people should buy devices where the firmware is already burned into ROM or ASIC or whatever?

This is not true.

Firmware is typically copyrighted, large, obfuscated, and executable on your system.

A password is a string that you can examine and offers no intrinsic threat - either exploit, or legal.

As per the link I provided to you, Debian's policy is that free firmware are shipped in the distribution -- non-free firmware requires you add the 'non-free' and/or 'contrib' parameters to your repository lists.

There is no need to wildly speculate about the motivations of the Debian team -- eg 'send a signal people should buy certain devices' -- when their motivation is explicitly stated.

The DFSG dictates non-free software will not part of the standard distribution. But they've made it easy to pull those files in (as above) via a one word addition to one line of your sources.list file.

> you'll need to prepare a USB stick with them downloaded onto it

Not really. Debian also offers one with all the firmware included but explicitly labels it "unofficial" (though very much official in practice and hosted on debian servers). The "pain" is thus literally to click on another download link.

It has been decades since I had to provide extra drivers to a Debian install.

It is true that the first-presented installer ISO images on Debian's downloads page lack the worst proprietary drivers, but another couple of clicks takes you to images with them included. So, worst case, you find that the image you have lacks such a needed driver, and you use another image. In practice, I just start with the latter, and have not encountered hardware not covered. For the absolute newest equipment, a "testing" installer may be the right version to use.

The Debian download pages provide installer images for all needs. I have not needed to look at secondary sites, which also exist for specialized needs.

Debian runs on everything I've come in contact with, or virtualized.

Debian's problem is that it's stodgy updating policy means 'Stable' is still on 4.19, things like Wireguard require a simple, but odd procedure to request apt pull packages from newer releases, and most of the copy/pasteable examples out there assume Ubuntu, and their versions/customization to critical infrastructure packages.

IMHO, the stodgy updates make it a perfect candidate for server based software. Personally, my Debian know-how makes it great for my desktop, and It has not failed for my use case: Development, Sysadmin, Browsers, Steam (or any other games releasing linux versions)

> things like Wireguard require a simple, but odd procedure to request apt pull packages from newer releases

That's not a good idea, as it breaks the assurance that Debian Stable provides. Using the backports repository is the recommended approach if you need a newer version of some clearly-defined piece of software. It will pull the newer dependencies it requires from backports, while still relying on stock-provided packages as far as practicable.

It's not a good idea, but Debian's wiki is nevertheless recommending it: https://wiki.debian.org/WireGuard

I tried it. Long story short, now I'm on Sid.

The Wiki instructions are outdated and WireGuard has since (March 2020) come to buster-backports.

It's dawning on me that it's likely to only become more of a pain with each iteration of upgrades (e.g. install tweaks, synaptic, remove apport... And now remove snaps).

Time to check out Debian!

*Edited. I can't type on phones.

Other threads have suggested various relatively-new distros as alternatives when stuff like this keeps coming up with Ubuntu. The two I have in mind to check out at some point in the future are Pop!_OS and Void Linux.

Pop! is Ubuntu-based, so no idea of the situation with all these other problems, but it intrigues me because they're doing tiling windows first-class.

My understanding of Void is that it doesn't use snaps or systemd, making the system as a whole significantly easier to understand, and simply sounds much much closer to what I want out of a computer (and much like 8.04 was when I first switched to Ubuntu).

I've used Debian at home for at least two decades now. It's excellent. Debian is basically Ubuntu minus a lot of user-hostile crap, so if you are familiar with Ubuntu, it should be a fairly smooth transition to Debian.

Watching this snap thing play out, and in the past, watching Mir, Unity, and Amazon Lens, has provided steady confirmation that I've made the right decision to stay away from Ubuntu.

While this is indeed helpful why do I want a version of Linux that has to be decrapified like Windows immediately after install and may with a future update may need to be fixed again. If you use non LTS you will have to "fix" it every 6 months.

I just upgraded to 20.04, and minutes later my machine is on its knees OOMing and unable to process remote connections. Apparently there is now yet another new file system indexer to play whack-a-mole with like updatedb in the old days except this one is hooked into systemd and harder to stop. Search for "tracker-extract disable" if you want the full details.

What do you mean by "hooked into systemd"? It seems completely standalone. Do you mean it's activating when new devices are plugged in?

...dumb question: Does this apply to Ubuntu Server as well???

Because if so, I'm sticking with 18.04.

only if you install your server applications using snap

So, why are people getting upset about this then? If you can simply just _not use snaps_?

I'm guessing it's not an option when using the GUI?

I was using the regular version for remote desktop VMs. I don't know about the server version.

If you're running Ubuntu's server, odds are that you're SSH-ing into the box instead of running graphical interface. Unless you specifically install snaps, I don't see how this would affect you.

Perfect. So I guess that means APT is still the same, correct?

Yeah apt is still fine and I've never seen it update anything behind my back.

You might want to consider jumping ship and go into the RHEL/CentOS world.

Stability and predictability is their main strenght. Each release is supported for a veeeeery long time.

Stability and predictability of the core OS. But then everyone uses EPEL for everything else which throws that all out the window.

Uhm, yes and no.

I mean... As long as you don't use EPEL, stability and predictability are pretty much granted.

I've been using epel on some machine and haven't had that many problems, though.

Yup, snaps are littering Ubuntu Server 20.04. They're in 18.04 as well, for that matter. Maybe not quite as much, but they're there.

>This is the exact reason I use Linux instead of Windows 10 or macOS

Not sure about win10, but macOS won't autoupdate apps if you turned it off.

If the app is not from an app store - it's up to the devs to have option to (auto) update. Most apps allow you to turn autoupdate off (in fact I can't think of single one without this option)

This is from another user in this thread:

> I've used both Windows and OSX for my professional work and while Windows is the worst offender when it comes to automatic updates, OSX is pretty horrible as well. At least with Windows you can expect some sort of backwards compatibility, while on OSX, one day you have to upgrade your entire OS, otherwise Notes or some stupid application won't launch.

- capableweb

I used to run OS X some time ago. When even Windows supported turning off auto updates. These days I am seeing Github issues saying that they can't use brew, clang etc because there is a update. And most of the time the updates are just huge (even compared to Windows).

Is this not true? Can you put off OS updates for some time (a few hours is enough for me) and keep using XCode, brew etc?

You can turn off auto updates of macOS and Mac App Store apps completely, yes.

I stayed on Mojave for months after Catalina was released and I had a MAS app that broke compatibility with the same companies own (abandoned) self-hosted server software so I just didn’t update it. I’ve since resorted to running that single app (and the abandoned server app) in a High Sierra VM.

The only version issues I know of that sound like what that other person referenced is:

If you update eg iOS to a new major version, sometimes iCloud-linked apps will say they need to upgrade something for new functionality (Notes specifically did this at least once in the last couple of years and iCloud Drive did it a few years ago).

But that is (a) not forced and (b) you’re told exactly what will happen (ie that older macs/iPhones won’t be able to use iCloud until they update too).

Some third party apps will set minimum required OS version (ie to use a new framework or api) but that doesn’t sound like what the other post was talking about?

You can still postpone updates, but yes, they've got more pushy than in the past. The issue is that iOS is the priority, and that has to be updated every year to support new models; so MacOS is also pushed to update in order to keep integrated systems (e.g. notes) in sync. This said, one can simply postpone upgrades indefinitely and just ignore the bits that break. I don't really use most of them, so I'm still not on the latest release despite it having been released some 6 months ago.

> Most apps allow you to turn autoupdate off (in fact I can't think of single one without this option)

Every MacOS app from Google auto-updates. You can turn it off iff you have hacker skills. The average user can't do it.

I should've guessed. Google being Google.

We have already installed two new Debian 10.3 VMs instead if Ubuntu. It's quite a breath of fresh air compared to Ubuntu >16.04 which I had to fight all the time to do things my way. Still runnng 18.04 on the dev boxes though.

Yeah, lol, looks like I'm no longer an Ubuntu user. Now I have to figure out how to force-disable this for server software and corporate Linux desktop users. Jesus.

You can set Snapd to use a proxy and just turn the proxy off until you want to update (lol)

I wonder how this affects offshoot distros like kubuntu?

I'm currently on Debian with KDE, but I think I might need to move to a rolling release distro due to some issues with SMB/CIFS (that have already been fixed in newest builds of KDE) that probably won't be fixed in Debian until the next release.

Maybe I should start looking at distros in general-- but Ubuntu is definitely out of the picture.

Give KDE Neon a try. It's based on latest Ubuntu LTS with up to date KDE. But it doesn't do everything like Ubuntu (like forcing snaps).

> But it can’t even be turned off manually.

Backwards compatibility is a positive as long as it's secure. This makes me hesitatant to what is going on. Auto updates good, no blocking not sure.

snaps are intended for non-power-users that don't want to deal with dependencies. Those users want things to mostly work without worrying about murky downsides. Auto-updating is exactly the right behavior.

If this is of concern to you, why are you using snaps? And why Ubuntu? What's the value-add over Debian?

You have misjudged who actually uses Linux. This setting would be ideal for all the billions of people Canonical wishes used Ubuntu.

Yes... Isn't that what I said?

If you agree that it's not the current userbase of Ubuntu, then you're saying people should quit using Ubuntu en masse, only a fraction staying behind.

The idea that you "misjudged who actually uses Linux" was based on the assumption that you think a product should generally cater to its users. If instead you think most of the users should leave, then okay, that's a valid opinion, it's just surprising.

Ubuntu (and GNOME, who seem to have the same mindset) have no clue in hell how to actually get the billions of proverbial grandmothers to use their software. All they seem to manage is to poorly ape Microsoft and Apple, which will never get them what they want.

Regular people wouldn't use windows if using it required them to understand the concept of an OS and install it for themselves.

People will never buy linux but they might buy computers with linux at some point just like they have bought phones with it. Android had things that iphone didn't have and at a much cheaper price point thus linux based phones are everywhere. I wish steam boxes had taken off.

The concern is that there's no simple way to disable auto-updates. If you want Ubuntu to turn into Windows, why not just use Windows?

Because there are so many different Linux distorts out there. I feel like at least one of them should be as newb friendly as possible.

That doesn't answer why it's okay to not give an option for advanced users. Even they want to use Ubuntu.

Too many options are confusing ala apple? But it really is simple enough to push the advanced options somewhere most users would stumble upon.

As I understand it, that one is Linux Mint. For windows users, it just looks like a slightly older windows.

That said, I don't think Newbie friendly and power user friendly must be at odds with each other. If you can figure out what the sensible defaults are, and provide simple toggles to customize things, you can cater to newbies, average users, and power users alike.

There is a world of difference between automatic updates by default and _not being able to turn them off at all_.

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