I see people hate snap packaging and removing it if their OS support it. Is it because it’s NOT fully open-source or just due to how the technology works?
Update: fixed typos
Because people still believe in one standard to rule them all.
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?
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
This is such a stupid minor thing, but it’s what made me switch from Ubuntu to Fedora, haha.
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.
Hmmm, can we just sticky a “snaps are bad” thread? I like to see activity but this same question keeps getting asked.
Also sticky Red Hat’s “response”, it should deter most of the neolibs.
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 is exactly my experience
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 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
Install Node with snap? Cypress silently closes. (This took some time to get to the bottom of)
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.
Didn’t know that about the docker snap but that is insane. It would be straight up unusable at work for me.
I tried to get microk8s up and running by installing it from a snap since I figured it would be a nice and easy way to get up and running quickly.
I’ve spent so much time trying to get it working that I haven’t even started to learn k8s yet since I can’t get the damn thing to run.
I think I’m switching to Debian for my servers.
Wtf I’ve installed microk8s dozens of times it just works ?!
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
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
- Canonical is pushing it too aggressively, removing the freedom of choice.
deleted by creator
tldr;
canonical …
- keepes the snap store closed source and all snap packages and distribution under their control
- “silently” replaces packages (like firefox) with their snap versions
- will completly remove support for alternatives (like flatpak)
They don’t respect your setting on OS version updates either.
I was running 22.04 with the firefox ppa, but the minute i shifted from 22.04 lts to 22.10, they reinstalled the firefox snap and a bunch of new ones as well. Ive purged them all again, but it looks like every update will bw this same fight. I ahoulsnt have to write an ansible playbook to fight my OS vendor.
Debain 12 with flatpac to fill the gaps is looking better and better by the day.
Disrespecting preferences, having to fight the OS… hm, where have I heard that before? 🤔
They don’t respect your setting on OS version updates
I was running 22.04 with the firefox ppa, but the minute i shifted from 22.04 lts to 22.10, they reinstalled the firefox snap and a bunch of new ones as well.
Seems like canonical wants to be the only software distributor for their OS. Wouldn’t suprise me if they completely disabled the option to install other repos and DEB packages soon.
Debain 12 with flatpac to fill the gaps is looking better and better by the day.
agreed
Wasn’t there an article posted here that the next ubuntu update won’t have deb support at first and it’ll come later? 100% chance they decide to be an immutable snap-based distro in the near future.
Snaps have centralized control. Canonical has to approve a snap package. Flatpak is like most of Linux. Anyone can make a Flatpak. Also, in my experience, Snaps had a lot of issues early on that were not present in Flatpaks. Now, Flatpak dominates and Snaps kinda feel like a irrelevant runner in a race long after the officials closed competition packed it up and went home.
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.
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.
Along with the other comments, imagine if people started to say, “I like Linux but it’s too slow and bloated, so I upgraded to Windows 11.”
On a less philosophical note, I find it immensely annoying how Snap creates mounts for its apps bc of how it clutters up disk management tools
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.
Short answer: Canonical is strong arming Ubuntu flavors into removing support for alternatives to snap (that run better and do the same thing). These types of decisions are generally worse for the overall Linux community.
Right now, a part of the Linux and Open Source communities are distancing themselves from corporate-sponsored projects given issues we’ve recently seen with RedHat’s CentOS and Canonical’s decisions with Snap and LXD
