simosx

You may distribute those .snap packages directly to the users.

Granted, you need to pay for your own separate Snap Store, unless someone makes the effort to create a third-party implementation.

> Maybe I’m just ignorant but it seems like allowing developers to push software updates without any review

When you create a snap package and post it to the Snap Store, you only get the default limited rights for your snap. For example, your application is not able to access external disks. But if your application has a real case to do so, then you need to request to have that access added to your snap.

I could not find a key for that, that is, per-package keys.

A dirty workaround would be to get the `.snap` package from the store, then install directly from the local file.

       $ snap download hello-world
       Fetching snap "hello-world"
       Fetching assertions for "hello-world"
       Install the snap with:
          snap ack hello-world_29.assert
          snap install hello-world_29.snap
       $ snap install hello-world_29.snap --dangerous
       hello-world 6.4 installed
       $ hello-world
       Hello World!
       $ 

No updates.

You can also

    snap list

or have a look into `/snap/`.

The directory `/var/lib/snapd/snaps/` shows the cached .snap packages, including the recent versions in case you want to revert to a previous version.

The discussion pinpoints the issue in the fontconfig cache files. It is being worked on. The issue is not "snap packages only show tofu characters" but rather in some cases snap packages cannot access the system fonts, hence the squares.

If you use LXD, then LXD is provided as a snap. Snap is currently the only packaging for LXD in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

I think the Ubuntu 20.04 runtime should be better than Ubuntu 18.04. More fixes, new features and updated versions of packages.

Selenium has standalone images with the browser so that you can use them with Docker.

It is too fragile to install yourself all the pieces.

You can control when to update, https://snapcraft.io/docs/keeping-snaps-up-to-date

The Mint maintainer was really unprofessional in his announcement. It is OK to feel strongly about something, but using words like `backdoor` is really bad.

With snap packages you get companies like Microsoft to deliver a native package for Skype, Jetbrain to deliver their whole developer portfolio, Spotify their music thing, etc. They can do so because they are basing the work in a common, stable runtime.

Snap support is evolving.

There are keys to configure when, and if, you get updates, https://snapcraft.io/docs/keeping-snaps-up-to-date

The total Linux desktop installation base is around 2.7%. Without automation, the Linux desktop does not look like it will attract any significant number of Windows users.

There is a snap package for Firefox, but in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Firefox comes from the Deb package.

Did you switch to the snap package yourself?

There are keys to control when these snap updates will happen, https://snapcraft.io/docs/keeping-snaps-up-to-date

It is immutable systems that help you with reproducibility.

There is no actual change between the snapd setup in Ubuntu 18.04 and Ubuntu 20.04. Where do you get info on unreliable docker deployments?

It looks to me that the dislike is emotional in nature.

A stock installation of Ubuntu 20.04 only has very few snaps. I think the only important one is the Snap Store/Ubuntu Software. If you can put up with the Snap Store, you can avoid (if you really want that) installing further snap packages.

1. Snaps provide granular confinement to the applications. Is there a network tool CLI that happens not to read/write local files? You can forbid access to the filesystem, forbid access to the X server and all other resources.

2. Is the whole packaging a pain? Just do the work once and create the snapcraft.yaml packaging file that describes the whole process. You can even use the snap build server to rebuild fresh snap packages (in six architectures) as soon as you make a commit to your repository.

3. Are you a software company that wants to distribute your software? You can do all the snap building in-house.

4. The same snap works in many many distributions.

Packaging and maintaining microk8s is a significant effort to do with apt. You are asking if someone managed to do all the work to package microk8s and keep managing it as a deb package.

In a default installation of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, there are only very few pre-installed snap packages. The only important one is the Snap Store, that allows to install DEB packages and snap packages. If you can put up with the Snap Store and only install DEB packages, then you are fine. If you remove the Snap Store and you are at ease with 'apt', then you can may do so.

In all your examples, it is their respective company that does the packaging. Skype is packaged by Microsoft, and so on. Here is the Skype snap page, https://snapcraft.io/skype

Canonical provides the tools and several companies are providing their software as snap packages.

Another example is JetBrains that provide all their development environments as snap packages.

I think that this is just the case with LXD. LXD used to be distributed as a DEB package in Ubuntu 18.04. Therefore, to make it to upgrade from DEB to snap in newer versions of Ubuntu, there is this dummy 'lxd' DEB package in the repositories that in fact installs the snap package of LXD.

Other than that, I do not think other packages are affected.

AppImages are a disaster waiting to happen. They are like Windows MSI installation files just downloaded from somewhere, running without any confinement.

Canonical packages LXD as a snap package. Other distributions can package LXD in their favorite packaging format, and some do.

Some developers are trying to package for Debian. The work is in progress at https://wiki.debian.org/LXD

Canonical distributes LXD as a snap package.

That does not forbid others to package LXD independently. Debian has been close to packaging LXD at https://wiki.debian.org/LXD It is a matter of picking up interest to complete the work.

Nah, it's just there, ~/snap/lxd/current/.config/lxc/config.yml

There are guides for this at https://discourse.ubuntu.com/c/wsl2 That's the place where you can find any working solutions for WSL2 and Ubuntu.

You can, if you focus.

There is sandboxing to protect the security of your computer.

An application that runs as a snap does not see the system-wide "/tmp". They get their own /tmp. If the snap is chromium, it has /tmp/snap.chromium/

The chromium snap would not be able to view files outside your $HOME. Also, it would not be able to read any dot files in your $HOME. Any configuration it makes, is separated into $HOME/snap/chromium/

There are a few rough edges, but the end of the discussion is that you get better security if something goes wrong, and it makes it cheaper for maintainers to created updated packages, and distribute them.

Proton is a packaged Wine (Windows emulator) with DXVK (like DirectX for Linux).

Snap packages are based on core images, so if there was interest, they could create a core image that has Wine and DXVK. Then any game would result Wine and DXVK.

RPM is comparable to Deb packages. There is no significant separation of one package from another apart from file permissions.

On of the first Humble Bundles for Linux games came with a Deb package of the game.

The game is a Linux i386 binary, which means that installing directly on your host will pull in all sorts of i386 libraries. If you host is amd64, it is quite messy.

You can also use a GUI LXD container for this.

1. First, setup your host according to the instructions at https://blog.simos.info/how-to-easily-run-graphics-accelerat... You will be creating a LXD profile called `gui` on top of the default LXD installation.

2. Launch a container with Ubuntu 12.04, an adequately old Ubuntu version, which is still support. Command: lxc launch ubuntu:12.04 mycontainer --profile default --profile gui

3. Copy the deb package of Machinarium into the container. Command: lxc file push machinarium_20121106-ubuntu_i386.deb mycontainer/home/ubuntu/

3. Get a shell into the container. Command: lxc exec mycontainer -- sudo --user ubuntu --login

4. Install the deb package. Commands: sudo dpkg -i machinarium_20121106-ubuntu_i386.deb && sudo apt-get install -f

5. Run Machinarium. Command: /opt/machinarium/Machinarium

You can reuse the container to install more software, or dedicate a container for each game.

There is already LXD for Win/OSX, https://ubuntu.com/blog/lxd-client-on-windows-and-macos

That is, you get a native LXD client, and then configure the appropriate `remote:` to connect to the VM that has LXD running.