Oh, I was talking about from the firefox snap. Once these patches land in the snap the downloads will go in ~/Downloads/firefox.tmp. That doesn’t help the deb of firefox though, you’re right.
1 Like
@kenvandine - so snaps all in? How far are you planning to go?
While I see advantages from apps maintenance point of view, security and compatibility, the rest are only disadvantages, mostly impacting end users.
Before “forcing” snap store over native deb packages have you even considered that:
- snaps are very, very slow to start, on lower end systems even up to 10x times (think of Spotify)
- snaps take up more hard disk space
- snaps ignore system themes breaking conformity and unity of whole system
- snaps “don’t properly talk to the system”, see above, in some cases can’t read display resolution, access WiFi status etc.
- snaps are not always “official.” They’re often built by well-intentioned volunteers, basically anybody, that kinda breaks security advantage.
this is a myth…
on xenial chromium 81 is a deb and has an installed size of 224MB:
$ apt-cache show chromium-browser|grep Installed
Installed-Size: 223958
on focal it is a snap:
$ ls -lh /var/lib/snapd/snaps/chromium_1143.snap
-rw------- 1 root root 155M Mai 10 01:41 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/chromium_1143.snap
now … it indeed depends how many extra dependencies a snap includes, but extensions like gnome-3-34-1804 or qt551 are utilized by more and more snaps so there is not much duplication of libraries anymore and snaps (which are highly compressed and never unpackage) are in general much smaller if you compare them on disk to the same (unpacked, due to the nature of debs) contents of debs.
most of the other points (except the last) you list are bugs and shotcomings that are being worked on actively (see https://forum.snapcraft.io for development discussions)
and this is exactly why snaps were designed with the existing confinement setup, so that effectively anybody is easily capable of distributing software without putting users at risk 
do you use a smartphone ?
with the (conceptually not too different) security models of android and IoS effectively anybody can package and distribute software as well … 
4 Likes
so you want that the system gives some random PPA owner 100% root access to your system, basically trashing security just because a core part of ubuntu was not installed when you tried to install the officially supported chromium package ?
also which PPA would that be, there is nobody officially maintaining a cromium deb anymore in Ubuntu.
most average users do not know what a snap or snapd are, they just want to use the software, why would you bother my 85y old mom with a cryptic popup, she just wants to use that browser ?
3 Likes
how ? where would that deb come from … we have exactly one fully supported version of chromium in the distro and that is a snap …
there is no deb anymore …
also, do you have any specific issues with snaps apart from: “I DONT LIKE THEM !!!111oneoneeleven” ?
it would be good to hear why you feel you can not use the snap package.
2 Likes
@farafeco Could you mind your tone? This is pretty insufferable and does not really promote your POV.
3 Likes
new tone, thanks i don’t want snapd packages or other thing not being (apt-deb) format,
I think what you’ll have to acknowledge that this is not a matter of Canonical overlords devilishly enjoying their agenda of user-oppression.
Offering alternatives means investing resources (which equals money) into supporting those. As any engineer will tell you: ballooning options is costly and often does not scale favourably in terms of quality.
Offering alternatives means … not to install something without your approvement.
cheers.
did apt not ask the general [Y/n] question (asking to install snapd alongside) when you apt installed the transitional chromium deb ? it did for me … if it did not for you this is definitely a bug that you should report to launchpad …
I still fail to see your problem … chromium is not installed by default … if you want to use the supported chromium and install it on a system that does not have snapd apt will ask you if you want to install snapd alongside and you have the ability to say no here …
really, nobody forces you to use the snap, you can say no at the apt prompt and download and install googles chrome deb instead if you feel like …
snaps are now a 6 year old technology and save a lot of ressources in canonical … i.e. the chromium deb required a full time developer just to keep it up to date and working across all LTS releases back to 14.04, with the switch to the snap the desktop team for example had all of a sudden enough free resources to invest man-hours into improving performance of gnome !
snap packages wont go away, their enhanced security as well as the ability to free up expensive developer time are way to benefical, i doubt you will see them go away any time soon …
… that said snaps by default are no hard requirement, you can always sudo apt purge snapd and find other ways to install your desired software in different ways, nobody forces you to keep snapd installed …
6 Likes
“system gives some random PPA owner 100% root access to your system”
opinions are fine but when statements are 100% bs one should kept them to themselves
well, it is a fact that dpkg installs packages as root and that dpkg also executes pre/postinst scripts in which you can easily do a cp bankpassword-keylogger /usr/bin this is by design and one of the main reasons why we started developing snaps …
while this is fine for archive packages that get checked on upload by developers, if you add a PPA it means you give the owner of the PPA 100% root access to your system …
2 Likes
Please provide verified examples of this malicious behavior.
I wouldn’t doubt there may have been 1 or 2 in the past so provide several, preferably recent.
(- we already know there was at least 1 malicious snap , no reason to stop using snaps because of that…
and we do not know how many thousands of PPA debs are malicious because the security measures the snap store provides are not applied/applicable to PPAs …
the point that PPAs give the repo owner root is a well known fact, nothing i need to prove, that dpkg runs as the root user while executing maintainer scripts is a fact you can check in the dpkg source …
that “malicious” snap you quote was simply a developer that wanted to monetize his work by adding a bitcoin miner to his gaming snap in a very blue eyed way but without any ill intend (feel free to read up the conversation on the snapcraft forum).
he removed the miner, apologized and the store grew a new upload check for exactly this use case to flag an uploaded snap in the future. none of this is possible with PPA archives …
there was nothing malicious in that above snap that could have harmed your installed OS beyond stealing your (CPU) resources, a snap can not cp bank-password-keylogger /usr/bin
by design …
2 Likes
@ogra - oh man, where do I start.
I understand where Canonical is going with snap store (the ultimate Linux app store) and I understand snap packages advantages (like you said similarities to apk packages), but what I don’t understand is why do you guys push it as a main feature in LTS!? It’s clearly not ready for prime time, there are bugs, critical bugs, snaps at best are in beta stage. Why couldn’t you just add a small toggle button to switch between snap and distro apps or just leave 18.04 solution?
You made a survey https://ubuntu.com/blog/ubuntu-20-04-survey-results and concluded that people want popular apps like Skype. But when I download Skype snap it just crushes on launch. Surprise! Apparently it does not work in Wayland. In that survey only 36% were positive about snaps, but still you go all in. It all just feels unfinished, rushed.
I fine, I will just keep using apt, github, ppa etc., but will casual new user get great experience with current snaps store?
I’m grateful to Canonical and all you guys for making great Desktop OS, but some decisions are beyond my understanding.
well, snaps are 6 years old (we started in 2014, 2 years before flatpak even … yet we are still accused for NIH “trying to replace flatpak” … so much about the " the-community-did-not-let-us-do-it" that @farafeco posted above…)
note that there are plenty of industrial users that run critical infrastructure of their factories on UbuntuCore (100% snap based OS), there are even a bunch of Covid-19 test systems and other medical devices running based on snaps, for canonical snaps are a well received commercial product since years already in the IoT and industrial space …
snaps on desktop are a bit younger and indeed there are still bugs to fix, but because we were aware of this we shipped some snap packages by default since the 18.04 LTS so we could collect some data for the 20.04 LTS … we had snaps installed by default for two years now and a lot of the found issues are solved already and further ones are in the works.
i feel sorry that skype does not work for you, did you report that to i.e. https://forum.snapcraft.io (the microsoft devs read there too !) or the skype support tracker so it can be fixed ?
“does not work” without any details is generally a pretty bad bug report and wont tell if it is caused by the packaging or if it is any issue with the software itself …
EDIT: regarding skype you might want to try running it from a terminal and prefixing the command with DISABLE_WAYLAND=1 … that will push it to use XWayland and should work fine … i’m doing the same for the Zoom Snap and that makes it run in a usable way on wayland installs…
9 Likes
One option is to subscribe to a channel. For instance, snap install —channel x.y.z somesnap
I’ve been using Ubuntu 20.04 for quite some time now and Ubuntu Software (Snap Store) is a nightmare. Searches for apps work very poorly, search results show a lack of curation due to the lack of icons for apps like Steam or mainstream apps like Telegram that are hidden right at the bottom of the app list and installation processes are hidden as if they were not occurring, forcing you to click “Install” again so you can see the progress bar etc. It’s just horrible. Terrible experience.