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Comment by codethief | Hacker News Reader

I had totally forgotten about this! For me it wasn't just the extensions. The font in the "Save Download As…" dialog in the Chromium snap, for instance, has been completely broken for me – all characters get displayed as the infamous glyph-not-found block. To make things worse, the dialog by default suggests some random directory deep inside the snap tree as download destination. Good luck navigating to a folder where you'll find your download again, given that you can't read any of the file or folder names…

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I've been using Linux for over 14 years exclusively. Build several linux hosting companies. I know Linux rather well. I've built a simple font manager for gnome in the past. I know the weirdness of gnome font thingies.

I've had this glyph issue for over a year. In chromium, Signal, some ebook app, and several other snaps.

I've tried many things. But gave up. Snap is not 'one layer of indirection' too much. It's hundreds of them. There's chroot, some VM, a virtual gnome, containerisation, weird user and permissions. And so on.

This complexity made me conclude that snap is a bad solution (to a real problem). Not the glyph issue, but the fact that I cannot fix it, is, for me, the reason to conclude it has, or will fail.

Wait, since when is Signal a Snap app?

Snap is more like a virtualization tool that you see in VDI and Citrix environments.

It’s sets out to solve a couple of problems in an app-focused way. As with any packager that packages dependencies, it introduces a few dozen more in the process.

Snap is a distribution format, akin to .msi or .pkg.

No, incorrect. Snap is a distribution format akin to VMDK or anything else which is not intended to be "installed" to a system, but rather run in a virtual machine or sandboxed.

If we are getting into details I think calling it a "virtual machine" is not correct either. Also since snaps have some integration with the host DE through launchers and so on they are not like VMDK's.

To be even more pedantic, there's nothing stopping you from using VMDK (or other disk images like VDI, VHD, raw/dd, etc) files as a container (like tar or zip), other than some extra overhead. They can easily integrate into your desktop environment, possibly even easier since there's probably more support for mounting disk images than there is for mounting archives...

Well, a squashfs file is already a disk image, so that's pretty much what they are doing.

Snap is already a standard in the IOT world. It's the desktop section in which it struggles.

Right! I ran into this not five minutes into a new 20.04 install and could not for the life of me figure out where the hell my download was, or why I couldn't access /home/julian/Downloads

Why this isn't more of a deal breaker I have no freaking idea.

This could be related to Why Chrome is using a different font size that the rest my system. Chrome is the only snap program that I have . The rest are plane Debian packages or Flatpack

I'm not a fan of Snap, but I'm surprised something like this font issue passed QA.

I think you overestimate the amount of QA resources available to the Ubuntu project. Looks like this was an issue that only happened after repeated use and seems somewhat related to individual systems' font configurations?

There's more info here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+...

I hope they conduct automated testing with screengrabs for high profile apps such as Chromium (that have something to gain from the snap isolation) and that the test cases have this added.

> I think you overestimate the amount of QA resources available to the Ubuntu project.

  s/available to/allocated by/

I don't know that Canonical cares too much about doing QA themselves. It seems like they've decided to delegate that to the userbase.

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