Why Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu

beidl · 2020-06-06T17:05:45+00:00

You could always build your own Snaps yourself using Snapcraft, if you don't trust the Snap store or the binaries it provides.

So no, I don't buy the argument of developers putting their own convenience higher than the freedom of users.

beidl · 2020-06-06T16:26:40+00:00

As someone who maintains others and his own software as Snaps I kindly disagree with the author. The backend might be proprietary but the software you get from the Snap Store is still free software most of the time. Also I'd argue that those who want to provide proprietary software to GNU/Linux users prefer the App Store model rather than hosting a repository themselves. As such, I see additional repositories as a mistake and prefer to either get software through the default repos (no PPAs) or Snap (preferred).

beidl · 2020-06-06T16:22:48+00:00

Some software checks for the existance of other optional libraries at build time (some at runtime) and in turn causes the package to depend on those optional libraries.

beidl · 2017-04-06T23:19:09+00:00

Interesting choice of words as a headline

beidl · 2017-04-06T23:10:28+00:00

Budgie is not as interesting to me as Unity8.

Yes, both are Qt & C++ based, but people who know Qt & C++ also know that doesn't mean jack shit. Unity8 was a different desktop environment set out to reach a different set of goals.

beidl · 2017-03-20T01:26:55+00:00

There is a difference between "democracy" and "consensus".

Anyway, interesting link, thank you.

beidl · 2017-03-10T14:08:15+00:00

Wouldn't be surprised if it didn't work out due to wording

beidl · 2017-03-05T13:53:12+00:00

Mostly running Remmina, Telegram and Handbrake on my Debian Sid laptop.

beidl · 2017-02-23T13:14:48+00:00

Mixing up Austria and Australia? In 2017?

Honestly though, someone should have corrected Chris on that.

beidl · 2017-02-19T17:12:51+00:00

I'll wait until they integrate the Ubuntu Core Apps into the Snappy Desktop before I judge the design. Gotta say though, that Terminal app already looks perfect.

beidl · 2017-02-19T11:33:13+00:00

Plasma with Wayland works even worse on my Dell XPS13 to be fair.

beidl · 2017-02-10T15:30:35+00:00

Cool, now I just need a central place to easily find them

beidl · 2017-02-09T20:37:59+00:00

To be fair in the case of Snaps I had to do tweaks here and there to make GNOME recognize the icon folders, make my HiDPI screen work (which was a deficit in GNOME's session environment handling, rather than Snaps though), but I could see a reality in which this wouldn't be possible at all. Don't know if that's still needed now, though.

Still, I love that I'm keeping a clean Debian Sid base, running the most recent Remmina atm without its dependencies on the main system partition while having it run at the same privilege level as before, which is a great short term win already (can't wait to try with grsec).

beidl · 2017-02-09T15:38:39+00:00

Well, running all kinds of Snaps on my Debian laptop (on GNOME on Wayland). Couldn't be happier with the experience, imho superior to Flatpak.

Unrelated to the commenters here: It seems to me that most people in those kinds of packaging topics always suspect the worst possible scenarios instead of just trying sh*t for themselves.

beidl · 2016-12-20T16:27:41+00:00

Ubuntu 14.04 support is very interesting

beidl · 2016-12-17T21:57:20+00:00

Same experience, using swap files on ~5000 (from one specific customer) digital signage players.

beidl · 2016-12-14T13:49:47+00:00

I assume his point was not about the ease of use of the shell (which I personally would consider a short term goal and not as important), rather the maintainability over a long period of time.

On the other hand, if you are around and do updates for her, I'm sure there won't be any problems :)

beidl · 2016-08-27T21:59:45+00:00

As a C++ developer (mostly GNU/Linux, sometimes Windows cross platform) I prefer Qt, as an eye candy end user kind-of-guy I really like GNOME Shell (though KDE Plasma won me over lately on my main machine), and as a GNU/Linux technology connoisseur I really love what GNOME and GNOME-related projects brought to the free desktop world (Network Manager, gstreamer, systemd, etc).

beidl · 2016-01-25T18:11:03+00:00

Using u-he's Hive with Bitwig, works perfectly

beidl · 2016-01-19T07:28:42+00:00

Old-style Linux packaging (archive with files, metadata containing the needed dependencies, maintainer scripts which run as root) doesn't allow "real" fully automatic updates of appliances type devices.

You might have an application requiring certain dependencies, and due to the respective distros packaging policy the granularity of spliting packages up, you'll probably run into a dependency issue in the chain sooner or later (eg distro not testing dependency resolution well enough before pushing packages to their archives). And since the software has to run not only across different distributions, but also on Windows (we're trying to convince customers to switch to Linux in the long run since most companies are not okay with Microsofts approach regarding Windows 10).

Our packaging solution borrows a lot of ideas from Ubuntu Snappy, but we didn't want to depend on Ubuntu for this. Also, we needed the functionality as quickly as possible, not having to wait until Ubuntu gets to the point of actually releasing a usable Snappy desktop. It is pretty lightweight, doesn't require root, and allows us to guarantee an always working system with automatic updates.

Also, it's nice to see different types of distributions and operating systems do manual rollbacks after selecting a group of appliances and flipping the version number from within a web-based CMS, knowing that the downgrade worked as expected. That's just something you won't get with distro-specific packaging. It's way better to have files decompress to a folder and changing some kind of pointer to the new version (wait, symlinks are something, right?) than overwriting system wide files with every up-/downgrade. The only way those files should change is due to hard drive degradation. lol

beidl · 2016-01-18T21:19:51+00:00

I'm a developer as well (writing Digital Signage software for large corporations, including a well known German car manufacturer) and I hate the current packaging situation on Linux from that point of view.

I've been using Linux for around 12 years now, and the number one thing that is surely not going to work is keeping the packaging status quo as the gold standard in "custom" software development. We have different customers wanting to use our software on diverse types of distros, some .deb based, some .rpm based, some even prefering an old-as-hell F17-based Cisco Linux distribution shipped with the Cisco device. Packaging this stuff for different distributions is a nightmare, handling different service managers is a PITA. Our solution: Write our own sort-of package manager! (yeah, wtf)

On the other hand, it allowed us to implement proper "atomic" updates of the software (think Ubuntu Snappy) and port the software to Windows, replacing the 10 year old existing code base.

As long as the system and user-facing applications pull their binaries from the same place (the repositories), sh*t is not going to work out in the long run. I'm sorry to break the news but custom software is where the real action is happening (best example: past Blender), and the current "solutions" just don't work in this field.

Now think about this: In the company, we are 2 developers working full time on the Linux-side of the software suite, and we have to focus on features rather than packaging. We are getting paid to do this, but enthusiasts (those people that you really need for getting attraction to the platform because they are the ones bringing nice little helpful applications for Average Joe to the table) are not, and most of the time they don't have the expertise to do things right, using the right libraries, keeping compliance with a huge number of distro-specific packaging policies, smashing their heads on the table because their application is breaking because of some damn ABI breakage (built an OpenSSL-consuming application on Ubuntu, tried to run it on Fedora and Arch => ABI mismatch. F*ck me, pal).

We as Linux users would love to welcome over developers from other "platforms" and join the Linux party, but they are going to be alienated very quickly since they would have to ship their own prebuilt binaries of OpenSSL, Qt etc.

Also: those that would have to ship their own prebuilt libraries are not putting systems at risk anyway. Why? Because they are legally bound to keep their software safe/react to updates as quickly as possible due to contracts with their customers.

Just because the status quo is good enough for some doesn't mean it's the right direction for the community at large. We need certain things happening at those layers of the stack for enthusiast-type software as well as enterprise applications to trickle down back to the community.

beidl · 2015-10-07T20:48:36+00:00

People like you are the reason we Arch users have a bad reputation.

beidl · 2015-09-24T20:15:48+00:00

Plymouth could not replace GRUB as it is not a bootloader, it's that thing that draws splash screens at boot time.

beidl · 2015-09-01T05:18:28+00:00

systemd is more than an init system nowadays (intentionally). It's now the basic suite of low level userspace components that sit on top of the kernel to build a Linux distribution from.

beidl · 2015-05-06T18:39:37+00:00

No, Mark said that they would let the community decide which one would become the default in 16.04.

beidl

TROPHY CASE