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You have a good point about making the desktop experience more painless and idiot-proof.

The real problem for me though is that snaps are slow as hell. I mean like taking 4-5+ seconds to open on a box with an SSD, i7, and 64GB of RAM. That's unacceptable.

The icing on the cake for me is that even through the command line as you mention apt now seems to be giving me snaps instead of debs for a great deal of programs, which affects much more than the store experience. And, also, regarding said store experience: if stuff like Spotify takes 5+ seconds to open I doubt a user coming from Windows giving Linux a try is going to want to stick around long...it would be great if there was just a better solution.

I second this, I couldn't care less about snaps, flatpacks, debs.

But snaps are - for me - A LOT SLOWER than everything else out there.

*.deb, binaries run stuff in less than a second.

Flatpacks, appimage, I have those running in a second or two. Snap, for the same app takes 3-5 sec. sometimes (I wouln't know why), it evens takes as much as 8-10 sec.

NOBODY can get a pass on artificially making slower apps in 2020.

> making the desktop experience more idiot-proof.

"If you make it idiot proof only idiots will want to use it". - this holds true. Canonical made the conscious and deliberate decision to treat users like morons by not even giving us the ability to decide how and when to install updates.

I gave up on Windows because of their blindly hostile approach to users, I won't be installing the latest Ubuntu - opting for Mint instead.

You're right, Apple is heating in the same direction by locking down macOS for power users :(

> The real problem for me though is that snaps are slow as hell. I mean like taking 4-5+ seconds to open on a box with an SSD, i7, and 64GB of RAM. That's unacceptable.

Spotify is specifically one of the snaps I use and frankly, I noticed it seemed to start a little slow but just assumed that was because of Electron or something. I literally don't care and never thought anything of it. I run it, it starts, and then I don't close it.

Besides, if Spotify users reject it, they can always switch to PPA or something else. It's their choice.

> apt now seems to be giving me snaps instead of debs for a great deal of programs,

"a great deal"? I've seen two mentioned, chromium and lxd. Where else have you encountered this where Debian has a package available from a maintainer but a snap shim is used instead?

Apt will also tell you a snap is available if there's no deb but that's just useful information.

> if Spotify users reject it, they can always switch to PPA or something else

Some apps, like Chromium have no alternative ppas available.

I installed KDE Neon 20.04 and when I discovered that Chromium was being switchted to snap, I searched for any current *.deb out there. NO proper ppas, just found some outdated Chromium 1-3 versions behind the current version.

If it wasn't for the KDE from Neon, I would have switched of distro in the hour. I switched to Chrome instead.

Got some old compiled Chromium just to have the thing available (I can just run it when I need it, it takes maybe 1/4 of sec to start).

Just hope Canonical doesn't try its snap thing in more critical packages or (FAR) worst, in the LTS server versions.

I would be getting popcorn to see the show when half the Internet start to ditch the LTS overnight over some half-propietary half-baked software being put in charge of its otherwise perfectly GPLed infrastructures.

Right, this is why Canonical moved Chromium to snaps - It's a ton of effort building Chromium for 20.04, 18.04, and all the intermediate releases every few weeks for a package that's in universe.

It's cheaper/easier for them to publish one version across all of Ubuntu.

> Besides, if Spotify users reject it, they can always switch to PPA or something else. It's their choice.

This is not what happens. The vast majority of users don't know or care why something is slow. They'll just say "Ugh, Linux is slow, I'm going back to Windows."

It's definitely not launching slowly due to Electron, because it's not Electron :)

It's C++ with CEF

You're essentially saying "I don't care because nobody tried to trick me specifically into installing a snap if I wanted a debian package" - I hope you know that on the way forward, Firefox will be snap-shimmed too.

The Enterprise Linux ecosystem is a solid alternative to Ubuntu. Fedora for desktop and either CentOS or Fedora for servers, depending on how stable they need to be and how much maintenance you're willing to do.

And SUSE/openSUSE for an alternative in the same segment.

Very similar roots, also RPM-based, but with a different take on things, such as using Btrfs and KDE by default, which I prefer.

SUSE (the enterprise edition) uses Gnome as default, i love Opensuse Tumbleweed, but i think Gnome (with the SLES-look) is much more stable than KDE. Anyway i use i3 nearly exclusive.

BTW: KDE is not the default, it's just the first in the list :)

btrfs is coming to Fedora 33 as default

> I hope you know that on the way forward, Firefox will be snap-shimmed too.

I see, so we're angry about things that haven't happened yet. TIL the OSS community has precogs and this is Minority Report!

Look, I get that two whole packages out of literally tens of thousands did this (I've seen lxd and chromium mentioned). But why don't we convict Canonical after they commit their crimes, eh?

Surely if it's on the roadmap then better to address it now and potentially avoid it rather than dig in deeper until sunk-cost fallacy suggests there's no way back?

Sunk costs?

How are there greater sunk costs related to switching distros later instead of now if Ubuntu starts actually misbehaving in a significant way?

I grant you, if you haven't picked a distro yet and this whole thing bothers you, by all means, pick something else! That's the beauty of the Linux world!

But if you're already in the ecosystem (and I have to assume most people complaining are... Otherwise why waste energy complaining about the actions of a company that doesn't affect you) I don't see how the sunk costs fallacy applies here.

It's sadly not as easy as you make it sound. I was recommended to use Ubuntu for my work laptop because the IT team couldn't guarantee support if you used another distro. I know my way around and particularly love Manjaro (and worked with Debian and SUSE and Mint) but the company uses proprietary VPN and a spy/monitoring agent and I wasn't sure I'll be able to make those work on a non-Ubuntu machine.

So yes, there could be huge sunk costs. After fighting with this work laptop for a full work day to get every single step of the onboarding completed, I am not looking forward to doing it again -- even less so if the proprietary and mandatory programs that I have to install can't be guaranteed to work on anything outside Ubuntu.

I've had a number of problems with snaps.

For one multiple problems with linux containers due to lxd now being a snap package, which auto updates, restarts and sometimes doesn't like switching networks.

Apps that needed mounts that weren't there.

I mainly use nix packages now for ease of installation, removal, updates and for nix shell.

Need to run a shell with ffmpeg? `nix-shell --run bash -p ffmpeg` And ffmpeg is gone after the shell terminates.

> Second, I use Firefox and anything that discourages people from feeding the Chrome monopoly, frankly, that sounds like a good thing to me.

I'm sorry but can you explain? How exactly is Snap helping Firefox? (I'm a Firefox user and I have never used Snap)

It's an admittedly weaker point: If folks want to avoid snaps (as this blogger professes) but choose Ubuntu then their next best option is (the default browser on Ubuntu): Firefox.

I guess a more succinct way to put it is: I actively oppose chrome and really don't care if the snap haters are screwed by Canonical's approach to packaging it.

I agree with you about chrome, but your point only works if nothing other than chrome is dependent on snaps, which seems clearly not what Canonical is aiming for.

Especially since Firefox have an officially maintained Flatpak package which works beautifully, at least on my machine.

Is the snap version of FF maintained by Mozilla, by any chance?

I second that question. Currently Ubuntu only forces Chromium to be installed as snap, not Google Chrome.

Many of us have no problem with the idea of snaps, simply the implementation and forced preferences. If I wanted corporate policy shoved down my throat I'd simply use Windows. :D

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23772524

> Third, for some desktop apps I want auto updates

> But as a desktop user, I appreciate that I have the choice.

Just so we're clear, it's not that the apps auto-update, it's that there's no way to stop them auto-updating.

So then don't install snaps and use PPAs or flatpak or compile yourself.

Unlike Windows 10 you do have a choice here.

I use Windows 10 and have a choice. I can use a package manager of my choosing. I can install an application that self-updates. I can pause OS updates in a control panel.

One of the biggest problems with Windows is that every app sets up its own update policy and comes from its own App Store. (Steam, battle.net, etc.,) But that's Microsoft's fault for doing too little, not for doing too much. And that's actually kind of nice.

> I use Windows 10 and have a choice.

So do I.

Their botched rollout of Edge, including installing it without my permission and placing it on my taskbar, shows that no, you don't have a choice.

> I can pause OS updates in a control panel.

This is misleading at best. You can pause updates for a time period but they're forced at that point.

Canonical's actions with snaps are very clearly steering us away from choices that were once easy to make. They come by default, you can't easily use a non-Canonical store (not even really possible at the moment), they force auto-updates on us and they trick us into installing them when we think we're going to install a traditional .deb.

I don't know why you're comparing it to Windows 10.

> Just so we're clear, it's not that the apps auto-update, it's that there's no way to stop them auto-updating.

Actually you can.

https://snapcraft.io/docs/keeping-snaps-up-to-date#heading--... for instructions on how to defer updates.

If you want to install a snap such that it never updates, see https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-for...

Deferring isn't a solution, it's a band-aid. Just as you can only defer Windows updates but not completely opt out, you can only defer snap updates; there is no global opt-out. Having to do a convoluted procedure for every app as outlined in your second link shouldn't be necessary and definitely shouldn't be hidden behind an obscure source that only snap gurus even know about.

This issue, combined with the snap server being closed source and controlled by a for-profit company that seems to care less about FOSS with every Ubuntu release, makes snaps a very hard sell to anyone with common sense.

With the direction Linux is heading between snaps and systemd, and old-school holdouts like Void and Slackware suffering from a lack of developers and long-delayed releases respectively, I'm leaning more and more towards adopting OpenBSD for daily driver use. Performance has improved, quality of life has immensely improved, and the team behind it actually cares about putting out correct, working, secure software.

Sorry, rant over and I really went out on a tangent there, but my original point is that snaps are definitely no good for the future of Linux and I believe will be a detriment to the platform going forward.

Good, good.

I'm still of the opinion that this should be a front-and-centre feature. Install from the snap store, disable updates for that app specifically, still have to tied to its store instance for manual future updates.

Is this a practical issue for me? Actually, no. However, the fact that they didn't just include it from the beginning is a clear indication that Canonical and I are starting to differ in our thinking when it comes to the autonomy of the user. Also the fact that they didn't allow you disable updating, but merely postpone it for a maximum of two months.

The ask is not really to have a snap never update. The ask is that you have the option to update only after a user allows it. This has the side effect that if the user never says yes, the app never updates. However the true goal is that you are in control of when your apps update. This has many benefits, I 'll only list two. If something breaks, you can immediately deduce that it is because of that specific update, instead of having to investigate your whole system on what's happening. Also you can always say no to updates on the day you have a presentation so you have no surprises.

The author of the article didn't mind the principal behind snaps, if you read his diatribe it was more about the performance of it and feeling snookered that Ubuntu was pushing snap so hard, even tricking people into using a deb that runs a script that then installs the snap version. It shouldn't take chromium 5-10 seconds to startup with firefox launches in under a second

Same here, I have the choice and so far snap worked good for me. I would rather install some random application as a snap then a deb that I need to use root to run the installer.

When I need to install some random app from the internet (last one I had to install was an advanced PDF viewer/editor) I manually unpacked the deb and found the binaries and run them as regular user.

I don’t get it either. Just fresh installed 20.04 last week on a new drive and have had no trouble completely avoiding snap or even really understanding what it is. I’ve used Ubuntu for years and may have used the App Store one time.

It's still in the background. Running a root daemon, spamming mounts and filesystem, whether you notice or not. Unsafe and obnoxious is not a good combination.

It's the same poor behavior that lead to the marginalization of Docker.

I came here to make basically this comment.

I install everything via CLI and pretty explicitly always avoid the GUI they have for installing software. It's never been good, ever.

I'm on 20.04 and I think it's a fantastic release, head and shoulders better than 18.04.

The only thing in the author's list that I really take issue with is installing a snap when a user attempted to install from a .deb file. That sort of shit is antithetical to linux, and if it continues to get worse would actually be a reason for me to leave Ubuntu.

But everything else is just a non-issue to me.