I see people hate snap packaging and removing of their OS support it. Is it because it’s fully open-source or just due to how the technology works?
I don’t know enough to dislike snaps, I’m just spiteful enough to dislike cannonical trying to force me to use thwm
You’re so real for this
There are philosophical and technical reasons to not like snaps
Technical
- Slow startup time
- Makes lsblk look really ugly
- For awhile users didn’t have a lot of control over when things updated
- Not designed to work with third party repos by default
- Requires apparmor so it doesn’t work well on selinux distros.
Philosophical
- Backend is proprietary and controller by a single company
- Has made the same amount of effort as flatpak to work on distros that aren’t Ubuntu
- Some people just don’t like Ubuntu
- Canonical is pushing it too aggressively, removing the freedom of choice.
Also:
- Creates a snap directory on your home. I hate programs that pollute my home.
- Requires a service (snapd) to function.
Not only does it create that directory but it creates new folders for each updated version of various apps… Very weird and confusing
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Perhaps it’s been fixed since, but a this type of thing was the main issue with snaps to me:
“Why can’t the program see the printer? Ubuntu can see the printer”
“Why can’t I save to this USB pen? It can’t even see it”
“These two programs are meant to work together, but they can’t see each other”
“I can’t open my project from my external drive”
“It won’t let me import the photos from my camera. It can’t see the camera”
Would have been less of an issue if they had an android-style permissions pop-up with each incident, but snaps just left you silently failing.
This was the most frustrating for me as well. While I appreciate Snap trying to be a universal installer of sorts, it breaks too often to be useful.
This was my experience too. Ubuntu asks if I want to install the docker snap, I say sure. I then try to use docker and it’s completely unable to do what I need. I then need to figure out how to uninstall the snap and then install docker normally.
I tried a few snaps, but everytime they were a pain in the ass and I regretted it. Now I avoid them at all costs
Same with Docker. Installed it because Ubuntu recommended it then spent a month trying to figure out why all my docker containers would randomly shutdown and restart themselves. I knew snap auto-installed updates, but had no idea it would do it even if the program was currently running and in use.
There is absolutely such a thing as too much sandboxing, and flatpak is already pushing the limit.
this is exactly my experience
This threads got lots of good answers, but I haven’t seen it mentioned that snaps sometimes mean reduced functionality.
Use the docker snap? Sorry, it can only access your home directory so no -v /some/path:/somewhere for you
Use firefox or chromium and keepassxc? Sorry, your browser plugin won’t be able to talk to your password manager
And the updates… dear god. In whose mind was it a good idea to show a “firefox is updating, exit now to avoid issues” TWO WEEKS im advance. Closing the app does precisely fuck all unless you manually snap refresh it
Containerised applications are a fine idea, but snap is a horrible implementation of it
Didn’t know that about the docker snap but that is insane. It would be straight up unusable at work for me.
To be fair, those are both issues with flatpak too. You can change the file system permissions with a command or flatseal, but I don’t know of a fix for the password extension issue.
In general the integration of flatpak is quite good (even more if we compare it with snap), but there are still some gaps. In this case there are some solutions like this one.
Install Node with snap? Cypress silently closes. (This took some time to get to the bottom of)
Because I can’t dismiss the Firefox update notification, no matter how many times I update it.
I’ve had to reboot every time.
Which, way to go you’ve reimplemented windows xp era updates.
Stop the app and run “snap refresh” and it should update anything that’s queued
yes, I did kill the process and update the image though snap.
this did nothing to remove the update notification that cannot be dismissed without rebooting.
Oh, weird. The notification itself disappeared for me when I click it (KDE)
maybe they fixed it, I switched to Debian over a year ago.
I remember when the snap version of calculator took like 12 seconds to launch and Canonical were like “yeah but what’s the big deal?”.
It basically turns your super fast Linux into feeling like a 10 year old windows machine.
I hear they have improved performance now though but there are many other reasons why snap suck.
I hear they have improved performance now though
It’s still not great. Better, but still slow enough to make you question whether you’ve actually launched the app or not.
Bloat and coersion from canonical when using Ubuntu.
Also I hate typing mount on my home machine and sifting through a sea of mountpoints.
Same. I end up either
grep -v -etmps and loop mounts ormount -tfor each type of physical mount. I suppose lsblk and findmnt might have better options and views.Lsblk suffers too.
oh? When I run
lsblkall of the docker overlay mounts are omitted. It does show loop devices, but otherwise it was the list of physical devices.Looking at the man page it looks like
dflets you exclude types too:df -h -x tmpfs -x overlay.When I run lsblk with no flags/parameters I get 18 lines of loop devices. Sure I could issue the command again and pipe thru grep to remove all the lines that have “snap” since I forgot to do it this time. I propose “snap” because couldn’t I have non snap-related loop devices?
Examining my disk partitions with df is ruined now. Every snap gets its own virtual disk.
I wonder if that could easily be fixed by just filtering the output of
dfto not show virtual disks (dfalready has an-loption to only show local disks, so would expect that changingdfcould be relatively easy).Note: I am not saying that I like snaps…
Ha I was just listening to the Linux Unplugged podcast and the guy was just complaining about this same thing
This is the reason I got rid of snaps
Just create an alias that filters loop devices. I mean, if this is your only problem with snap, you can fix it in a second. But I’m betting you have other problems with it.
At best it works more or less the same as an ordinary package. It only gets worse from there.
Several times I’ve been stuck on a broken version of Discord because on the server side they force an update to the new client, and the new client has not been packaged as a Snap yet.
Getting native hosts to work in Firefox is possible, but a giant pain in the butt.
Basically anything that needs filesystem access is unreasonably troublesome. I gave up on getting Snaps to work with my external drives.
There is simply no scenario where I think “wow, I sure am glad this was packaged as a Snap!” There have been many scenarios where I thought “god dammit why is this a Snap?!”
Had a low end laptop, i believe it was lubuntu that i installed because i knew ubuntu was too bloated for that laptop. However I was not aware that it used snap and running firefox kick started the fans on that old laptop. Resouce hog seen and searching for firefox direct binary from apt seemed like a chore so i replaced with mint. Snaps automatically i did not want to deal with for old computers. Was happy with mints removal of snaps and it is very user friendly.
Canonical has a history of ignoring established practices and established software projects in the FOSS community and instead rolling their own in-house competitor behind CLA licensing agreements that make it hard for community developers to contribute. It feels like an embrace-extend-extinguish situation to me. They did it with Unity (replacing GNOME 3), Mir (replacing Wayland), and now Snap (replacing Flatpak). There are also technical reasons why many Linux users don’t want these userspace/sandboxed packages (Flatpak and AppImage included) taking over the position formerly occupied by native distribution packages (.deb, .rpm, pacman, apk, etc) because of issues with unnecessary copies of dependencies and poor integration with the rest of the system. These concerns apply to Snap as well, and Ubuntu has been pushing to replace .deb packages with snaps.
because the snap folder in your home directory by default starts with a lowercase letter while all the other folders start with uppercase (hidden folders don’t count)
all other reasons are secondary
Downloads and Documents starting with a capital letter is my biggest pet peeve with Ubuntu. It makes it a lot more annoying to navigate through them than if it was all lower case.
Why is this fun fact always forgotten?
Snaps can and will automatically update without your consent and there is no, zero way to stop it. You can delay, but even that is a pain in the ass.
Think about this from a systems administrator point-of-view… There are third party developers that can push arbitrary updates out to your production servers.
In no medium to large IT shop would this be considered even remotely acceptable.
If I wanted to cede all control over my servers to a bunch of half-assed services that randomly restart, I’d have gone with Windows. They’re both doing everything they can do to lock you in. With Microsoft, it’s par for the course. From Canonical, the erstwhile face of consumer friendly Linux distros, it’s a slap in the face to their FOSS roots.
The developers are dismissive of the users. Every online conversation ends with “don’t worry your pretty little head off”
its a scam.
there was this jerk working as an intern at red hat. lennart. he made the decision to break the linux dogma: do one thing and do it good. systemd was born. red hat drools. an important step towarda ending open-ness. later snaps. later closing red hat stream. profit.
if you use systemd or snaps you could just fast forward and use apple.
Snap is not fully open source. It’s slower than flatpak, it’s centralized to Canonical’s servers.Flatpaks so not update by default where snaps do, so if a feature breaking update is released and you haven’t disabled automatic updates, you’re screwed with snap. Flatpak does not need admin privileges where snaps do.
