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Comment by eamonnsullivan | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I understand the absolute hate for snap that I see everywhere. Can you enlighten me? I use snap for emacs (the edge/28 version), slack, and (occasionally) Firefox on my daily driver laptop. They all work fine. I've not noticed what's wrong with them.

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1. The autoupdate disable feature is essentially "echo snapcraft.io >> /etc/hosts"

2. Opening them is slow once per boot.

3. It's mystery meat to the highest degree. Might as well use windows.

Real shame because Ubuntu has things going for it that no other distro has. Namely the beautiful font rendering and sane desktop defaults.

There's a clean way to disable updates in the refresh.hold option, no? Or are you missing a feature like apt's pinning where you can exclude single packages from getting updated, but otherwise keep using the "update all packages" functionality? I think that's a rare enough use case that users can be reasonably burdened to use a non snap version of that app.

I agree with the "mystery meat" criticism though, especially for Firefox they should make the packaging process transparent.

refresh.hold has an upper limit of 90 days, which is ridiculous...

Keeping your snaps including the browser > 90 days behind in security patches seems like a really bad idea. It's better you have to actively postpone it periodically, having weighed the vulnerabilities publicized & fixed vs whatever your motivation to holding the update, rather than have a fail-open type of configuration that you can forget in the "not updating" state. Firefox fixes and makes public a RCE vulnerability quite frequently, more than once a month on average.

Also, if you want to have a more leisurely pace of browser functionality changes, you can also choose Firefox ESR that still receives timely security fixes.

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