Upgraded Ubuntu to 22.04, where Firefox is Snap by default. Wasn’t going to fight it, especially since Canonical has made 3 blog posts talking about how much faster they made Firefox on Snap.
Since then, I’ve had subtle but annoying issues.
- Can’t Google things that have a colon after the first word- i.e.
error: file not founddoesn’t work - I get notifications for pending updates
- Other apps like Gnome’s Software take a minute+ to load on my beefy computer
This isn’t even a meme. Snap is trash. I wanted to be neutral and not join the “hate train” but seriously. Snap is that bad.
I have never touched it and I feel like I miss out on the experience.
Happy Fedora user here
Sib! I’m glad not just me, snap doesn’t even damn load 25% of the time for me!
Yeah snap firefox always took a while to launch for me. My real problem though was that it just seemed to ignore my systems DNS settings so I couldn’t use it to access internal websites in my VPN, and there was no simple fix for that. Just installed native firefox from some sketchy repo instead
Why from a sketchy repo?
Try to change a disto, then. debian/void/arch/gentoo. )
It’s not about me - I can remove Snap no problem. I want to encourage better defaults though, and if Ubuntu won’t listen on their forums I’ll throw out the warning for other users here :)
I just installed that flatpak gnome software plugin and ignore that Ubuntu Software app. Flatpak gives me the benefits of Snap (like being able to use the latest version of some software) without the issues described above.
I do have some rendering issues (unsharp text and UI elements, lines etc) with some software on Wayland though, but I believe Snap had the same problem.
After trying Gentoo I can’t go back. I can’t imagine not being able to choos things like my SSL implementation.
I’m still researching what OS will be ideal for me when in the close future and it seems until now it’s ubuntu (or kubuntu), but I will make sure removing snap is the first thing to do.
Linux Mint endeavors to stay snap-free. Might be of interest, even if it doesn’t ship with KDE by default.
Question, if I’m looking for a mild learning experience in linux, would mint be too user friendly or not? I have (k)ubuntu in mind for now just because it might be more or less adventurous, are my thoughts correct?
They’ll be about as adventurous as each other. Kubuntu and Mint only really differ in the desktop environment installed and a few of Canonical’s bad decisions that Mint undoes every now and again. Beyond that, they’re both just Ubuntu.
You’ll learn about as much as you would on any mainstream distro.
In that case, I will reconsider it. Thank you for your mind opening reply.
Mint is super user-friendly. That doesn’t mean that it’s any less powerful if you’re looking to learn power-user/admin things though.
Good to hear so! Thank you.
I’d only consider Elementary OS “too user friendly”.
Then… just use Debian and live happy.
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So, like what’s your use case? Professional work or just faffing about with stuff at home, procrastinating?
I have no idea why someone like me, a non-professional, would turn to a corporate distribution with a “stable” release model and have it be a Canonical product or similar.
I got into linux for mainly three reasons: I could install the applications in a single neat command using the terminal (that shit was amazing coming from XP); It was not some big tech dictating and changing up my workflow on a whim; Lastly I had a moment of ethical reconing around 2016 and the ethics of FLOSS is superior.
Canonical keep doing things, trying out what sticks on a live audience and it’s generally not liked by people. To me it seems like a very unstable experience. It had its innovative days in the 00’s and it’s all appreciated but since long gone.
Often the critique aimed at Canonical and the Ubuntu team is disregared with “That’s a loud minority” – yes and no. Of the grand total of Ubuntu users there are a huge amounts of casuals and worker bees (tech folk given Ubuntu with little reason to stir up shit at their employment) who are not interested. Then there are those who are very interested in the tech behind the product, the enthusiasts - if you take into account the grand total, sure then there is a loud minority, but why would you take into account a large swath of uninterested people’s non-existing-opinions?
Sorry, went on a semi rant in order to say: if you choose a corporate distro you are going to have a corporate experience. There are independent enthusiast distributions out there that run their ship through enthusiasm and not corporate intentions.
Sure you know all this but I felt like expressing myself this morning haha…
Snap, flatpak, even appimages don’t always work, so all 3 suck. Everything I have ever installed from snap or flatpak has never ever run (click the .desktop file and the program doesn’t run), sometimes even appimages won’t run, whereas anything compiled from source runs just fine 99% of the time. I hope that the Arch team NEVER even considers adding these 3 garbages, otherwise I’ll have to look for another distro, which is gonna be extremely painful.
You also even upgraded to a recent Debian Sid-based Ubuntu release.
BugUbuntu 22.04 cannot even be considered LTS given that they just got software from Debian unstable release branch.
I still don’t understand why BugUbuntu developers do this, being always basing their releases in a snapshot of Debian unstable release branch and just upgrading LTS ones at all until software gets frozen while still promoting it during this time as a full release and LTS.
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@OsrsNeedsF2P maybe you should use fedora or arch linux these distros have the best stable repositories that i ever used
All these “new kids on the block” like snap, flatpak and this other thing are complete crap. Distro maintainers just don’t want to do their job anymore and roll off the effort so that devs have to do it.
Luckily I use a proper distro without these bullshit “app solutions”!
One of the primary goals is making less work for app developers who can now just make a flatpak and be done with it instead of making 30 different debs and rpms and such. The main reason flatpak has been so widely adopted has nothing to do with distro maintainers…it’s that developers can make something everyone can use and not think about it beyond that.
Snap is just an extremely bad solution that works poorly with the additional issue of centralizing control in Canonical’s hands.
Flatpak packager here -
Flatpak is actually seamless if the upstream is aware of it. With the exception of things like IDEs (which should have full system access) and daemons, the only issues Flatpaks run into are packaged apps that use things like their own File explorer instead of Freedeskop defaults (since Flatpak can’t intercept custom file explorers and display their own prompt), etc.
So to summarize:
- Flatpaks are actually quite good
All I read there is that flatpak was made so that developers can do badly what would be the job of the distro maintainers and is not the job of the developer in the first place.
You realize developers generally package their applications for something regardless? The only difference on their end is that instead of making a deb or an rpm that will serve a fraction of Linux users, they can make a flatpak for all of them.
And distro maintainers/other third parties can and do make flatpaks all the time…Fedora for example creates their own flatpaks for basically everything in their repositories, and they’re the biggest “true believers” in flatpak you can find. It’s more work for them.
So you’re telling me that everyone is burdening themselves with more work instead of focusing on what they are good at and is even happy with that?
You’re really not responding in good faith and just looking for dunks. Clearly, when I said it was more work for Fedora maintainers I was providing an example of them going above and beyond to provide flatpaks as evidence for it not being a move of laziness. The Fedora project creating so many of them would not be necessary for flatpaks to work or to be useful.
It’s fine to not like flatpaks. Sandboxing causes a lot of headaches for users that are still being ironed out. But it wasn’t created out of distro maintainer laziness or a scheme to push all the work onto app developers. It was and is an attempt to make things easier for developers and to make applications available to every Linux user. And you know what? It’s better now for me. Back in the day it was a lot harder to switch away from Debian-based distributions because everything you found would be a deb. If it was too obscure or new to have been picked up by distro maintainers, you were stuck building it yourself. Nowadays, when I find some tiny project on gitlab, the developer is much more likely to provide what they’ve made in a form I can actually use regardless of my choice of distribution. Everything is accessible to me and I never feel like I’m missing out like I did in the 00s. I wasn’t happy with the packaging situation then, but now things are a whole lot better.
There is a “appimage” solution for developers. I.e. just make you app “fat” (let it bundles everything it needs into single executable), then user just downloads it and launches. Even automatic updates can be supported, afaik!
“Appimage” (and flatpack etc.) shoud not be used instead of standard disto packages, like firefox, chromium etc.
Packaging is on the distro maintainers and not the developers. Or at least it shouldn’t be.
This was never the case even before all of these new solutions. When a developer makes something, they’re going to release it for people to use. They generally are not going to just leave it sitting in a repo and let people figure out building it themselves until a distro maintainer happens to package it.
The traditional approach is very good for core components and staples of the desktop where distro developers can curate an experience where everything works with everything and is in harmony. It’s not, however, very good at getting applications the end user cares about out there. Flatpak/Appimage and traditional packages complement each other nicely and cover each others’ flaws.
So what’s the point of having distros then? Why not jusy snapOS or flatpak OS?
Curation and guaranteed interoperability.
The best part of Linux is shared libraries and being able to see exactly what dependencies will be installed. With snap and flatpak all of the libraries ship with the package. You mind as well go back to windows if that’s the way you wanna do things.
No thanks, I’ll enjoy free software :)
