The thing I hate most about snaps is how they pollute the mount namespace with loop mounts. Install a few apps and 2/3rds of your `mount` output will be /dev/loopX devices. Especially annoying since I often do loop-mounts myself and picking them out from the flood of unrelated snaps is a pain.<p>If they could somehow hide the mounts (in a different mount namespace maybe?) that would be cool. I mean still, I would prefer more open formats such as flatpack and appimage (since with snaps you buy into the Canonical ecosystem with no way to provide alternative appstores) ......
I use Ubuntu and i'm sick of having snaps forced on me. When I next install, i'm either completely ridding the system of snap or i use another distro. I'm fed up with it.<p>The kicker is sometimes when you use apt to install a package, sometimes it installs a snap! It's madness!
One of the experiences that formed my hatred of Snap was when trying to install Notepad++ while trying to find a worthwhile editor to migrate to. Running via WINE it was 20.6MB installed, and even WINE itself was 1.2GB, but that 1.2GB was shared by other programs. On one machine due to package conflicts preventing an appropriate Mono install and laziness in sorting my multitude of prefixes I couldn't get Notepad++ to run via WINE and had to install it via Snap. The Snap install of Notepad++ took up 1.3GB all by itself. On a 32GB drive.<p>It hasn't gotten any better in the five years since for total Snap install sizes, because with the way they work they often install every single dependency siloed. Imagine if you had to install a new instance of DirectX12 for every game you had, or install a new instance of Python 3.12 every time you wanted to set up Tensorflow. Firefox when installed via apt is currently 63MB and its total size after being run and configured with things like session data and add-ons is 243MB. If I install via Snap its somewhere around 190MB in size and when actually run and configured jumps up to around 550MB for reasons I don't understand. And that's not even including the /var/ spam which actually managed to fill both the 32GB drive and a later replacement 80GB drive to the point where Linux had 0KB of free space. It happened so often I copied a shell script just to clean /var/ and edited it to run every twelve hours, like cleaning calcium buildup out of a fountain pump before it clogs.
I won't use Snaps.<p>Please stop trying to work around my chosen distro's package maintainers.<p>If I want to use your program and there isn't a package for it, I'll build it from source myself.
Other than the clickbaity title, the second paragraph begins “ Traditional package managers are perfect” - which is untrue. Then the post ends “ Educate me.” - such a “change my mind” attitude seems rather trollish.<p>I dislike snaps as much as the next person but I wonder if we do need another discussion about it.
My concern is that a lot of laptops come with soldered in, non replaceable hard drives and all these sandboxed programs take up a lot of space. So if you buy cheap laptop with 256GB storage and start installing snap/flatpak/appimage eventually you’ll run out of disk storage and won’t be able to upgrade it (storage, that is). And the only solution is to buy upgradable laptop or a laptop with a lot of storage upfront.<p>That’s just one of the things that is messed up and annoys me.
Ignoring Snaps - what are Flatpaks like today?<p>Totally understand the value in a distribution model like Flatpaks and am willing to adopt them but I haven't had the smoothest experience with them in the past so I tend to avoid them right now.<p>The last time I tried them was longer than 12 months ago - I installed Discord and it was missing some features at the time due to sandboxing (I don't remember exactly, it was either push-to-talk, hot-mic, or showing what game you were playing that didn't work).<p>I also had some other issues with other Flatpaks - I think there were theming issues.<p>How is it today? Can I install VSCode, Chrome, VLC, Steam, Discord as flatpaks and have no idea they are Flatpaks?
Snaps were one of the main reasons I moved from Mint to Ubuntu.<p>Traditional package management is a terrible fit for modern systems and apps.<p>If you have dozens of apps and they each have dozens of dynamically linked dependencies, you'll probably get an occasional compatibility issue.<p>At first I really liked Flatpak, but the ecosystem isn't there. Everything I use is in Snapcraft, with Flatpak I still would occasionally have to hand install something or add a custom deb repo.<p>My only real complaint is the proprietary backend. It doesn't directly affect me much, since it's not like I'd want to use an alternate store when the official one has everything, but it does get in the way of adoption without seeming to benefit canonical that much.<p>Companies are way too afraid of FOSS competitors, they forget how much users like convenience and standardization and sticking with stock settings.
I think what really put me off when it comes to Snap was when I wanted to use a yubikey with Firefox, but Snap tries it hardest to make it difficult to add a pkcs11 device.
This is discussion at 2019-2021.<p>There are many distros where snapd is not installed by default, including Linux Mint:<p><a href="https://snapcraft.io/docs/installing-snapd" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://snapcraft.io/docs/installing-snapd</a><p>Nobody is forcing you to use distro that includes snapd by default.<p>Snap has advantages for server software that are using Snap strict sandbox:<p>- Strict sandbox does not allow read access outside of /var/snap/APPNAME/common . Only common directory is writeable.<p>- Snap code at /snap/APPNAME is read-only and can not be modified<p>- When new version is released, for example with security fixes, it is automatically updated worldwide, keeping servers secure.<p>Linux Mint has MintUpdate, that has options to enable automatic update of .deb and FlatPak packages, keeping everything up-to-date and secure without any clicking. Windows and Mac does not have that, you need hundreds of clicks to update each software separately, having many apps still vulnerable.
I had Debian installed. Wanted LXC and LXD. And it brought snapd with it. Immediately my server went from a load of 0.3 to 2.5+. Continuously for months. Snapd always in the top cpu. No idea why or what it did.<p>I finally caved and gave up on LXC. Removed it and snapd. Load immediately dropped to 0.5 again.<p>I. Hate. Snapd.
Snaps are one of the two main reasons I'm ditching Ubuntu for basic Debian. The other is apt spam berating me to upgrade to their pay security service.
snaps is starting to give me a headache. I installed chromium in my ubuntu and it installed it as a snap (even through apt, it just a transitional package that installs the snap.), and for some reason it has a dependency with cups (printing software). Every time i delete cups it is reinstalled..again and again, i couldn't find any solution.
Hear hear. It's really inexcusable — if there's a bug in a shared library, that library should be fixed across the board. That, and the implementation is cartoonishly bad, for example you can't extend a partition while the system is running the way that you could before, because you've got random read-only file systems mounted over root.<p>If the money spent on the salaries of the CADT developers making this were spent on the Debian package maintenance, many problems would vanish.
The last time I used Ubuntu, I ended up installing either bitwarden or discord through snap. Some electron app anyway.<p>My system logs bloated into the gigabytes with constant errors about some snap or other having faulty security settings. Absolutely no user-facing indication of any type that there's an error, just endless log messages.<p>I use Arch now. It's still just as miserable, but at least my problems are my own fault this time.
Why? Simple: because commercial sw want them, they need something they can made at home without giving ANYTHING to the community, ESPECIALLY if the software is crap, as 99% of commercial sw are, to avoid being depicted for what they are: vendor of crapware.<p>Why all such systems state they add security while they do the contrary? Because they demand to the upstream handling all deps, witch means that a generic student who have write a simple chat client need to take care of new releases of SSL who he/she do not even know much because that's just a deps of some wrapper he/she use. They state "but they are isolated", true, but they need to punch holes here and there because your snappyfied firefox need to download files, let's say pdfs, your external reader can read and so on.<p>That's just playing the Windows game not knowing it and refusing to know what a modern FLOSS system should be, like Guix or Nix.<p>Unfortunately most FLOSS devs see commercial software and try to mimic it without understanding that ideas behind it might be also technical but in general they are economical, and to support a business model they accept technical crap. Much FLOSS devs fails to understand that FLOSS model is superior IF done the FLOSS way, inferior if it try to mimic some other models not knowing why.<p>If only people knew the past, the classic desktop OS with the OS as a single application where anything is just a bit of added code in the hand also of the end users, no commercial software today would be able to compete. But most do not even know the past, do not even know that some modern tech was invented in the past in better ways than today and do not understand that the Conway's law is more generic than it appear, goes beyond Lisp and have a generally valid meaning in paradigmatic terms.
AFAICT snaps and flat packs are a way to push package management upstream. That might not have been bad if there weren't more than one such thing to support.
> Sure, Snaps make it easy to install 3rd party software, but I just find this problematic, causing fragmentation, and just all around a bad idea.<p>He knows the answer, he just doesn't like it for stupid ideological reasons.
I feel like this xkcd perfectly encapsulates Snaps: <a href="https://xkcd.com/927/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://xkcd.com/927/</a>
You’re a company and your software actually runs on Linux. You want to reach as many people as possible. So you make a .deb for Ubuntu. Or you go with a package manager that is cross-distro.<p>That’s why.
Snaps move the packaging burden from the distribution to the software maker, which is how it should be. It's the only scalable way.<p>Imagine Microsoft having to package the millions of distinct Windows applications.
Package managers are not a sustainable solution to application distribution. It puts way too much on package maintainers, which is a thankless job. Whether or not you like Flatpaks, Snaps, etc, it's clear that we need some sort of cross distro (and preferably cross platform) application format that's simple for developers to target.<p>Personally I ship static executables, but that doesn't work for GUI apps.
There are so many half baked takes, but this is my favorite:<p>> There will always be a market for stable-over-latest software, especially for businesses.<p>That market is called the nvd.nist.gov at best and 0 day brokers at worst. Why do people stil not accept the fix forward supremacy and patch their mess?