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Comment by jgneff | Hacker News Reader

You can now completely disable automatic updates of Snap packages. [1]

[1] https://snapcraft.io/blog/hold-your-horses-i-mean-snaps-new-...

The last time I looked at Ubuntu as a daily driver, a few years back, I remember reading the threads about snap and its forced updates. The sheer arrogance of the snap team in their hardline refusal to acknowledge that this would be useful to users was staggering, and for me, ample reason to write Ubuntu off.

Glad that they finally came around. I'm sure many people are happy with this.

Canonical watched this exact same shit play out with Microsoft and Windows yet decided to do the exact same thing. Mind boggling.

Maybe they were trying to take a page from Microsoft's business model; take control away from users only to sell it back as an "enterprise edition" brand store.

Give this man a medal. Thank you.

To update to this version use:

    snap refresh --channel=edge snapd
    snap refresh --hold

to get rid of automatic updates.

Yeah I mention this towards the end of my rant (in the article) but it's a) not available yet and b) not clear whether it'll actually notify you when there are updates to be made. I'm guessing it expects you to unhold at some point to get "refreshes".

I'm fine with that. Nothing drives me more mad than to be in the middle of an interview taking notes and then suddenly land in an endless loop of being forced to restart my browser. It's not like some of us don't have work to do while we're in the browser and the utter disrespect by the designers of this crap to the detriment of their users is baffling. This is one thing where commercial software has something of an edge over FOSS: you can't even threaten to withhold your $ if they misbehave. Power to the user.

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