Hacker News Reader

Comment by abrookewood | Hacker News Reader

Yep, I've been gaming exclusively on Ubuntu (mainly because I want my desktop to match my servers) for several years. If you aren't playing the latest AAA FPS, then everything pretty much works.

View on HN

How much work is it to get snaps out of your way? Canonical seems to be going all in on them as their business strategy.

Not that much. TO be honest, I have a few installed (Heroic Games Launcher for one), but the main one I wanted to avoid was Firefox - which is easily doable. It is annoying that we have yet another way of packaging apps - would have been better if they just supported Flatpack

Do you ever find it "updated" to the snap version? I have Ubuntu on my work laptop and every so often after an update Firefox will suddenly be the snap version and I'll have to reinstall it.

I no longer remember all the exact steps I did but I only googled them in the first place so presumably they are there to be googled still. But it's possible to fully remove snapd and all snap support and then taboo it so that it never comes back. Or at least, it's been a few years and it hasn't come back. FF has remained a real .deb from the mozillateam ppa. It was a few different steps though not just uninstalling a few packages but also editing some apt config files I think. Sorry that sounds useless but like I say I just googled it up at the time, did 15-20 minutes of reading and poking, and never had to touch it again since then. It's been several version bumps.

..edit.. I installed a dummy package that displaces the nagware about the pro version too so I never get those messages during apt update any more.

Taking a quick definitely incomplete look I see at least:

/etc/apt/preferences.d/mozilla.pref

  Package: firefox*
  Pin: release o=LP-PPA-mozillateam
  Pin-Priority: 501
  
  Package: thunderbird*
  Pin: release o=LP-PPA-mozillateam
  Pin-Priority: 501

/etc/apt/preferences.d/nosnap.pref

  Package: snapd
  Pin: release a=*
  Pin-Priority: -10

and removed ubuntu-pro-esm-apps and ubuntu-pro-esm-infra from that same dir

but also there is a mozillateam ppa in sources.list.d, and I don't see any installed package name that looks like it might be that dummy ubuntu-pro-esm thing, so maybe it got removed during a version upgrade and I never noticed because ubuntu stopped that nonsense and it isn't needed any more? Or there is some other config somewhere I'm forgetting that is keeping that hole plugged.

Anyway, it WAS a little bit of fiddling around one day, but at least it was only a one and done thing so far.

I kind of expected to be off of ubuntu by now because once someone starts doing anything like that, it doesn't matter if you can work around it, the real problem is that they want to do things like that at all in the first place. Well they still want what they want and that problem is never going away. They will just keep trying some other thing and then some other thing. So rather that fight them forever, it's better to find someone else who you don't want to fight. I mean that's why we're on Linux at all in the first place right? But so far it's been a few version bumps since then and still more or less fine.

I recommend downloading the executable-in-a-tarball form of Firefox and running that. I personally do that with Nightly, and I find it works quite well.

As someone else says, for Firefox (and Thunderbird) I just uninstalled the package manager version entirely and dropped Mozilla's regular distro-agnostic binary tarballs in my home folder. Using the built-in update systems also avoids that problem from .deb versions where updating the package could make the browser yell at you that it needs to be restarted when you try to open a tab.

Mozilla also has its own Apt repository, which can be more convenient.

Hmm, I might move to that. It is definitely annoying when it just periodically just stops working because I haven't restarted it and there is an update available.

No, hasn't happened so far.

I also game on Ubuntu and snaps have never been in my way. I actually like them and wish more non-game software was distributed this way, but Canonical has a brown thumb when it comes to growing their weird little side projects.

Setting up `apt` to pull from a different repo (to say install firefox.dpkg instead of snap) requires like 3-4 commands which are easily searchable.

I'd had effectively zero issues avoid snaps.

> How much work is it to get snaps out of your way?

If you don’t want what makes Ubuntu Ubuntu, why not just run vanilla Debian instead?

Ubuntu releases supported (aka "really supposed to work") versions much more frequently than Debian, or I would have switched already. As it is, I just make the appropriate changes to purge Snap and run Firefox from a Mozilla apt repo and Thunderbird from Flatpak via Flathub.

You are talking about Debian stable which is released approximately once in 2 years. People who want to have more (most ?) recent software on Debian should go for Debian Testing. Or Debian Sid, which gets upstream updates almost instantly but requires more Linux knowledge in case something gets broken.

Just use Linux Mint

There are a few games I play that have native Linux versions available (e.g. Warhammer Total War) and getting support requires you to run Ubuntu. Not the end of the world, but that plus some dev work was enough to get me to stick to it.

Linux Mint is Ubuntu

Not as far as the Game Devs are concerned. I was running Kubuntu and that wasn't 'supported' by them - only Ubuntu LTS.

You just install it. The debs work.

I just did this yesterday after my Kubuntu system got buggered up by snaps:

https://gitlab.com/scripts94/kubuntu-get-rid-of-snap

Up until now I didn't care how my software was installed, but snaps REALLY don't play nice, so it's time to retire them. Canonical has lost this battle, and the sooner they accept it and move on, the sooner they can recover their reputation and put this madness behind them.

Honestly snaps are fairly painfree nowadays.

I mostly agree, it's just annoying that we have so many competing formats. I imagine it is even more painful for developers trying to release software - it's a very fractured ecosystem.

I’ve used Ubuntu since 7.04 and recently jumped from Ubuntu to Debian. It feels more like home than ever before.

All the things you’re used to without the corporate “sugarcoating”.

Yeah, recently moved from ubuntu to ultramarine plasma - more responsive, more features, smoother, really good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com