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Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

If that goes on for 2 weeks, doesn't it kill the app and update anyway?

If you ignore the notifications for two weeks, yes. But you even get a notification at least four hours before updating saying you have little time left.

That said, if you run `snap hold firefox`, it will wait indefinitely.

Not updating isn't a solution. What works for me is a systemd service that does a snap refresh on boot. At least I have some controll on when it updates.

I know it is simple to do, but care to share the unit file?

It's the most basic file possible but it does it's job.

cat /etc/systemd/system/upgrade-system.service

  [Unit]
  After=network-online.target

  [Service]
  ExecStart=/bin/bash -c '/usr/bin/snap refresh && apt update && apt upgrade -y'

  [Install]
  WantedBy=default.target

The problem is that the dialog says to quit the application so snap can update, but snap doesn't do that. It checks a few times a day and bails if the application is running. It doesn't wait for the application to exit and then update, like the dialog indicates it would.

Thus you quit the Firefox, wait a few minutes, assume it has been updated because why shouldn't it, and after two weeks it gets killed mid-session.

Completely inexcusable UX...

I've encountered this exact issue: It kept bugging me to close firefox so that I can update. I closed it. Then I relaunched it and the message popped up again. I repeated this process for a couple of days until I gave up, uninstalled snap, and installed flatpak.

Issues like this are present in a lot of highly-opinionated software; they become utterly unusable when used in a way that deviates from the dev's ideal vision, or ways they plain just refuse to support. Configurability and transparency is almost always a good thing in software. It seems that some Devs will have to relearn this lesson the hard way.

For the record, the solution to this is to run "snap refresh" manually right after you exit Firefox.

Are you the same people who bitched when Win10 just restarted to install updates?

Yes this comment has a little malice in it.

What do you mean "just" restarted? Isn't killing one single program a subset of what happens when your computer restarts? And isn't 2 weeks a lot more lead time than Windows gives you?

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