[wilonth]

Wow they're still pushing snaps, the project with some the worst engineering I've ever seen.

- Extremely slow at doing anything, even the most basic commands.

- Ridiculous auto-update mechanism (you can't even disable it wtf).

- Random, nonsense limitations (why can't I open dot files and dot directories???).

So terrible that for most apps that I installed with snaps I end up installing the deb version later on.

What an abomination, it is a devil that's hurting the Linux desktop everyday.

[Saris]

My favorite experience with snaps is Firefox just closing in the middle of doing something because it wanted to update, and it didn't even bother to check if I was using it first.

[sockaddr]

This also happened to me. So I decided to uninstall the snap and “apt install firefox”

Guess what I got?

A freaking snap. Yes, try it.

I’m done with Ubuntu

[enobrev]

This happened to me and since I had to immediately stop what I was doing, I used the opportunity to take snap off my system completely and reinstall Firefox properly.

[booleandilemma]

I specifically moved away from Windows to get away from automatic behavior like that.

When will these system designers realize that the system shouldn't do anything observable without me telling it to?

Imagine if a kitchen oven decided to perform a self-clean without any human interaction "because it hadn't performed one in awhile".

[camgunz]

This happened to me on my work laptop and I immediately closed the lid and started using my personal Mac instead. Fuuuuuuuuuuck that.

[beardbound]

My snap version of Firefox on Ubuntu kept bugging out my plasma taskbar too. Consistently reproducible, and annoying until I figured it out. I uninstalled the snap and manually added it through apt.

[CalRobert]

Snaps are getting me off Desktop Ubuntu after 12 years of happily using it.

[lumb63]

Canonical seems to be trying to push users off of Ubuntu. I switched to Arch from Ubuntu about 6 years ago after seeing how aggressively Ubuntu would auto-update, and because of Zeitgeist. I would never look back.

Arch is customizable, simple (in the sense that there are no surprises; things work as expected), and has a great community. Folks here can argue about snaps or flatpaks, and I can happily use AUR to install nearly anything. If it’s not there, I can publish it.

I’m not forced to adopt whatever GUI Canonical thinks is best for me in a given year or whatever their trendy new craze is. I can enjoy i3, tmux, vim, and ignore the rest.

[Gracana]

Same here. I was a happy Ubuntu desktop user for over a decade. Now I’m a happy Arch user.

[pmontra]

I moved to Debian 11 and recreated exactly the same quite customized GNOME desktop I had on Ubuntu 20.04. Nothing is missing except snaps.

[pydry]

Same here. I used to use it coz it was one of the better debugged distributions that "just worked" and I didn't want to futz with deep config files like I would with arch or gentoo or deal with some confusing "nonfree" workarounds like with Debian.

These days it's looking like Fedora holds that crown.

[wing-_-nuts]

I switched to pop OS (after a brief stint with an arch distro) and have never been happier.

[groestl]

I left Ubuntu server and lxd because of it. Maybe a bit emotional, but f*ck that, I don't need this in my life.

[bitcharmer]

Same, my next OS reinstall will be Fedora and I've been a loyal Ubuntu user for the last 20 years. It takes around 20 seconds to start a silly Spotify client on my dual Xeon workstation with 64 GB of RAM. Numerous users reporting slow startup times but Canonical just pretend the problem doesn't exist and proceed to shove snap down everyone's throats like their lives depend on it.

[gtaylor]

Same. Just moved to Fedora about 6 months ago and have pleasantly surprised. Works better on my laptop as well.

[inciampati]

My father in law has been driven mad by the snap notification that say you have to close an application within the next 30 days in order for it to be updateable.

[jmholla]

And it's not anytime within the next 30 days, it's a time in the next 30 days where it being closed coincides with snaps auto-updates.

[curt15]

It's like they were inspired by Microsoft's worst practices.

[Jnr]

For some reasons they ship it with servers as well. So the first task after getting ubuntu up and running, you have to uninstall snap.

[hobs]

One of many reasons to not use ubuntu for your servers.

[dizhn]

LXD is a legit product. Too bad they only ship it as snaps. I think Debian finally has packages for it but I haven't tested it. I actually stopped using it because I don't want to use an Ubuntu stewarded project. More and more it's getting harder to use plain lxc. Almost all resources are talking about it in an lxd context nowadays.

[phendrenad2]

I'm curious - what's wrong with snaps on the server?

[7speter]

Well snaps are supposed to be this great server feature because you can install whatever great program from whatever other distro ecosystem using snaps… or something

[skeletal88]

I have no idea how to update firefox because of this. I get some notification about not being able to update but it doesn't tell me why.

[noveltyaccount]

You have to quit Firefox and then manually update the Snap. I thought restarting Firefox would trigger auto-update, but no.

[sacnoradhq]

Canonical is an expert marksman footgunner.

They take bizarre risks and insist on reinventing things badly.

Security, infrastructure ecosystem integration, and defaults that don't work with reality.

The advantage of RHEL/Cent and sometimes Fedora server-side is it's boringly-reliable. The kernel especially. For development, the userland isn't great and the desktop is mediocre.

Qubes is interesting for security, containerization, and running apps isolation where Fedora, Cent, and Debian (possibly Ubuntu and Windows) are all side-by-side choices as app substrates.

[phendrenad2]

Canonical makes a server OS and also releases a desktop version for nostalgia reasons (my guess). They should just deprecate Ubuntu Desktop already and be done with it.

[Seattle3503]

The file limitations kill my productivity. For permission reasons Firefox won't open local html file on my machine. My work VPN loads a loval file to log in.

[ye-olde-sysrq]

I've been using ubuntu server for I don't even know how long, but am going to be moving all my stuff to debian when I rebuild my hardware here soon.

I should've done it a long time ago but until recently Ubuntu has been "debian but with some nice little extra bits of effort here and there to help make it smoother". Now it's "debian but with a lot of spicy canonical opinions dumped on it".

[sliken]

I hate snaps, doubly so when they appeared on a LTS release and some /dev/random sillyness broke simple things like booting.

However this seems pretty silly when what actually changed is the default OS installs will not have flatpak installed. Easily fixed with "apt install flatpak". It's just a default they are changing, not purging flatpaks or preventing them from working well.

[markstos]

I like the security features of Snaps would accept some trade-offs for that benefit, but Canonical started shipping a Snap of a browser with known issues like breaking media keys.

Security improvements are welcome, but that was a feature that seemed important and reasonable to keep working. (Maybe it works now, but based on that experience, I gave up on Snaps until I heard more positive reports).

[thangalin]

And:

- Violates XDG Base Directory Specification

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1575053

[brnt]

I've started using Ubuntu in Warthog times, when their value prop was refreshing and sorely needed: an out of the box usable Linux distro. It was my distro until 2020, when I realized they were going in a direction I don't care for (you could argue a direction opposite their original mission), and that other distros have reached and exceeded Ubuntus level of polish. Basically, take your pick, and it's gonna be at least as good.

I ended up with Debian because I like stable but not ancient (CentOS?) and it comes with a release cadence similar to Ubuntu LTS.

[JeremyNT]

This is some crazy NIH syndrome from Canonical.

We've been here before, of course - they pushed their own DE (the original Unity, not the current GNOME theme) for a while as a competitor to GNOME, and they also pushed Upstart over systemd. There are probably other cases I'm missing.

Eventually they gave up on those pet projects for pragmatic reasons, but Snaps seem to be the hill they want to die on (presumably for internal political reasons and/or some weak attempt at lockin).

[techwizrd]

This is bone-headed NIH move from Canonical, but I don't think either of those are good examples. Both Unity and Upstart were released prior to Gnome 3.0 and Systemd respectively and had a quite a significant investment in development time from developers and Canonical as well as an existing base of regular users and corporate users.

The original Unity DE was released in 2010 prior to the release of Gnome 3.0 in 2011. Upstart was originally included in Ubuntu in 2006 to replace sysvinit, and writing upstart scripts was a huge breath of fresh air. Systemd was released in 2010.

As a developer and user, I hate snaps _and_ flatpak. Both are user-hostile and constant source of problems requiring hours of Googling (especially the Flatpak sandbox!). I ended up purging both from my system a month ago and have been much happier since.

[cabirum]

Deleting and pinning snapd is the first thing I do on every fresh Ubuntu install. Next, install ff from mozillateam ppa and chromium from flatpak.

[wankle]

I do the same, pin snap. For Firefox I just download it, it lets me update it from its Help menu then offers to restart itself. I don't use Chromium, use Chrome. It does seem like Canonical is trying to push away all but corporate users, perhaps even all Desktop users.

[phendrenad2]

This is the kind of attitude that holds Linux back. Nothing is ever good enough, but "doing nothing" is considered just fine. Snaps aren't perfect, but adding "the ability to edit dotfiles" later on is a whole heck of a lot easier than whatever you're a fan of.

[_0ffh]

Yup, I ditched Ubuntu for good when they started with this snap nonsense.

[CoolCold]

On my servers I use LXD and certbot from snaps, cannot say I have any noticeable complains here.

[Spivak]

> it is a devil that's hurting the Linux desktop everyday

Don't you just remove it if you're using Ubuntu, never install it if you use Debian/Fedora/Arch, and pretend it doesn't exist? I've never run into an app I want that is only packaged for Snap.

[wilonth]

Some apps chose to distribute with snaps first, past and present. And without snaps they might've pushed a more unified or better experience with something better.

Canonical has money to do lots of good, too bad they waste it on terrible engineers and terrible projects.

[Saris]

On Ubuntu they hijack apt commands to install the snap instead for some packages, so removing snap is only part of the steps you'd have to do.

[calvinmorrison]

snaps just create so many weird sandboxing issues with the environment. If I run "firefox" with it already open it will not create a new window, it will wait 30 seconds and generate "firefox is already running".

I tried about 10 times to get mysql workbench running, but it depends on some key store backend through dbus, I haven't be able to get the conncetions working through snap so i cannot access a database since, for whatever reason, it has to go through the keystore.

The failure message? 'dbus-launch' does not exist.