Please, do not use snap into UBUNTU, it's too early

Desktop
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Hey there, sorry but that post happened during the weekend and I’ve only been catching up with it now, Í’m going to reply as a Ubuntu Desktop Team member on what we are doing and why, hopefully removing some your worries.

I don’t think such statements are helping the conversation, at the contrary they are creating fud against opensource projects, hurting the reputation of new technologies that have potential and damaging free software on the long run.

I know it can feel that the developers are dismissing the problems when they ask you to report specifics but that’s not the case, we just need to understand the problems properly to be able to work on them.

SNAP technology is ready for simple users. Try enabling livepatch on Bionic LTS and I bet it will “just work” for you. It’s a simple system component which bring better security, gets auto-updated, doesn’t get in your way, isn’t big or slow.

You could word your messages differently and say

  • some of desktop snaps are slow, for example gnome-calculator
  • desktop snaps still have some integration issues (e.g theming)
  • the isolation which comes with snaps (and other technologies like flatpak) can create problems for components that need to interact with files or other system components

Those statement are all true, desktop components are more challenging to get working correctly and we still have work to do.

You can probably also add

  • the packaging of some the snaps is buggy

But to be fair that’s also true of some of the debs and not a problem with “snaps”, just that those packages are newer so went through less testing/fixing/stabilization.

Be re-assured, we know about those problems and we are working hard on resolving them.
We don’t plan to onboard on migrating stacks of debs to snaps and removing the debs (at least not until we feel confident snaps are ready for that, which we agree is not the case yet)

Now as mentioned in the previous comments, chromium is a complex project and difficult to maintain. It’s also a webbrowser so security sensitive, which means it’s a component we need to keep updating on all supported Ubuntu series.

It’s not even our default browser in Ubuntu, but yet to keep up with security updates on all series (which often ends up requiring things like backporting of new toolchains) it costs us almost half time of a paid engineer, which is a pretty expensive in resources for a small team like ours.

Now it’s easy to state that $company should be paying to keep investing lot of money to maintain a product you get for free but that’s neither fair nor work out (the company is going to get bankrupt and you will get even less in return).

So yes, we need to reduce the maintenance cost for chromium. We could simply delete it from the archive and tell users to get it from a ppa or Debian and make clear we are not the ones supporting the maintenance cost. That would be letting our users down though and we believe that’s not right. We do believe though that the snap solution will allow us to keep providing it our users with high quality for a lower cost and is the right thing to do.

We don’t plan to delete gnome-calculator or other debs at this point since those don’t have that maintenance cost problem.

Yes, agreed that the gnome-calculator start time is a bit embarassing and that we need to get it resolved, it’s on our list

What do you mean “heavier”?
Taking the chromium example, as state on the other topic, the snap is smaller than the deb!

Yes, gnome-calculator has a start time issue but GNOME snaps have specific constraints that don’t translate to e.g chromium, vlc, libreoffice. Please back up such statement with fact so we can work on the issues (when they exist), otherwise it’s fud and just damaging for Ubuntu/our communities/free software.

The calculator one has been done in 17.10 so it’s nothing new. It’s about time we deal with the startup issue though you are right.

Chromium we need to migrate for the reasons explained before, and we do believe we can get it working well enough that most users should be just fine with it.

We don’t plan to migrate other desktop components at this point.

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One point which is also dismissed when you state that snaps don’t provide anything over debs is that for a decade a class of users have been asking for newer versions of software on their stable LTS distro, snaps provide an easy solution to that.

The use of ppa has been an acceptable solution for some users but

  • they are not obvious to find/enable
  • deb packaging is not easy which means the number of people working on providing software updates in ppa is rather low, you will just find a subset of packages that interest users there
  • some updates can’t be done in a ppa, for example when needing new system libraries (or the ppa needs to provide them, but changes in the library then could create issues/conflicts with other components from the archive)
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Hi, thanks a lot for your reply and time taken to explain us in detail !

Maybe some of our posts were over-reacted, but some previous answers also tend to underestimate our feelings and were received as “look, snaps have many more advantages than the constraints you describe, they’re here so get used to it”.

So we have told our advice, devs heard it, now we have all to move on to improve snaps and the 2 main concerns - launch time and confinement restrictions for user (access to other partitions than home).

I very well understand the particular point of Chromium and that it took too many resources (useful elsewhere), and you reassure (as Alan Pope did) that no other deb would disappear until at least snaps are ready for daily use, so we’ll try to help with reporting bugs :slightly_smiling_face:

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Thanks, to you and everyone who provide useful feedback and actionable data in the form of bug reports.

The concern about the ability to save downloads to an external hard drive out-of-the-box without the need to manually connect an interface has been heard, I have filed a store request for auto-connection.

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One major problem with migrating deb packaged software to snap packaged is the lack of ability to supply custom AppArmor profiles, which is especially an issue with security-critical software like a web browser.

Until this is fixed, full migration (removing deb in favor of snap) is irresponsible and will break security minded environments. In my case, I will no longer be able to use chromium on Ubuntu.

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Can you give some specific on what you are looking to do? The bug report mention blocking access to user files, which you basically get by default with the snap which has its own private user dir (just disconnect the interface that let you access your normal user files)

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@seb128

(google translate)

Be assured that I do not want to fud. It’s even hurtful that you can think that. I spend the majority of my free time for opensource projects with great respect.

I support Ubuntu since version 8.04 with great luck.

I know exactly when the calculator was added as SNAP. There are many messages that we have received from users on the forums complaining about snap.

I have also completed a bug report on this slowness but only with the items that I can have and remains waiting for any requests.

On the help forums, snap issues are quite common and the help requests that come with it. That’s just why we had to report a current concern about the arrival of chromium that might cause this to happen with other major software. obviously it’s a lack of information about it.

It seems to me that this is an appropriate space to communicate incomprehension between the developers and the daily users. Where else to do it?

I hear that you are concerned about some remaining dysfunction and really thank you for it.

This post will obviously allow you to bring explications on the proposed changes and for us not to passively undergo them.

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Sorry if you found the comment offensing, I was not speaking about your intend but about things you are writing.

It would be a more reasonable position to state “please don’t replace debs by snaps without making sure those have no regression in performance or usability” than to write that “snaps are not ready for normal users” (written like that it implies the technology is not ready which damages the reputation of a good project and hurts the feeling of a good team which is working hard on it, when the reality/problems are not with “snaps” but with “some snaps” which are mode demanding/need work)

Remember also in those conversations with users that debs are not perfect, it’s not uncommon for upgrades to hit a packaging error which can let the system is a buggy state/not booting for example.

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87

(google translate)
I have nothing against snaps but they shouldn’t be imposed.
Inexperienced users use Ubuntu Software to install new applications and often choose to install the snap instead of the .deb out of ignorance, then the snap is updated and the user finds himself with many Megabytes occupied by the various versions without understanding why.
Ubuntu Software should better highlight the snap packages to avoid these problems.

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There you assume they would be better served by the deb, but maybe they do want the snap because it’s more uptodate, or maybe the snap for that software is directly maintained by upstream and better maintained.

You have a valid point that snaps by default keep previous versions installed and that those take disk space which can be problematic for some users. The answer there is probably to talk to the snap team about allowing to set the number of revision to 1 (instead of 2 which is the default and lower limit now)

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I can agree to some point. On the other hand you miss the great advantage of switching back to previous version if something went wrong.

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Personally I’ve got mounts and symlinks and can probably turn any child-safety locks off without too much risk, but I’d say “widest possible usage case” includes being able to save to a flash drive without needing to find a setting and change it. That’s likely to confuse and inconvenience non-experts, and shouldn’t be pushed as a new normal.

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Putting aside that snap auto updates are not user controllable I don’t understand why such updates don’t present a user notification . Can’t fathom the reason there, users should always be notified of any update…

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No thanks! I only want to care if the update goes badly or I have to make a decision, software is updating faster and faster these days, last thing I want to care about is worrying that each time I install software the amount of my notifications will keep increasing over time.

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Interesting. I guess Ubuntu is taking a different approach that what Debian did. For example, here’s Debian chromium’s versions https://qa.debian.org/madison.php?package=chromium&table=debian&a=&c=&s=#

They seems to have decided that if upstream breaks using new unsupported features, they will simply not update it. That obviously has tickled down to Ubuntu https://askubuntu.com/a/890625/169736 and their “solution” was snap.

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Pretty sure it’s because the software FTBFS in the instances where it hasn’t been updated.

Debian maintainers can’t hope to patch every piece of software, and that sort of long-term breakage would normally lead to it being dropped from the repositories.

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One area where I think both snap and flatpak are too immature: qt apps.

There is no way (no obvious way, at least) to configure the theme. This is not just a matter of aesthetics. For example, in hidpi screens this means that all qt applications installed as snaps are barely usable, since the default font is too small and there is no way (no obvious way, at least) to change it. I usually do that by means of qt5ct. There is also qgnomeplatform, which is not packaged for Debian. Anyway, neither of these solutions seem to work inside the sandbox. This is not because the QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qt5ct, QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=1 is not exported, I think, but because qt5ct is not installed in the sandbox, am I wrong?

Do you know of any workaround?

Today I wanted to install Anki and:

  1. The deb package has a broken dependency. That has already been reported in launchpad some time ago but unresolved as of today.

  2. So I thought, well this kind of breakage of relatively complex, relatively unmaintained, packages is one of the very reasons for snap to exist. And it did fare better but still borderline usable.

I ended up installing from sources.

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i dont know if someone Already anwserd this the way i will.

What i see on most systems there is no problem with long startup after first start. Problem is the way snap is made its first startup of aplicaiton will always take time but after that it should be realy close to normal. i used multiple distributions and including Virtual machines in both vmware and virtualbox

On small set of devices(non that i encountered) snap opens slowly every time for unknown reason.

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It’s good to have feelings, it proves you’re human (always good ;), but we should try to be driven for objective arguments and not by feelings. And yes snaps provide more advantages, than debs. This doesn’t mean they should always be used for absolutely everything, because there are cases where debs are still a better approach for practical reasons, and snaps still clearly have to be perfected, has the snap team people say, and has they have been doing.

That is not what was said, at least that is not my interpretation of if. What I believe was said is that there are no plans to replace all deb packages from Ubuntu, and that probably debs will be on Ubuntu and the clear majority for many years. Nobody said that no other package will not be replaced, that would be unwise, because more packages may end up suffering of similar problems to chrome, or of some other good reasons that may justify such replacement.

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We have multi terabyte disks, and before that multi-gigabyte. I don’t see that as a problem, however it does offer the possibility to roll back to a previous version of the software if the new version has bugs that don’t allow the user to use it safely. What’s better for the user? I would say it’s the snap.

Users want software easy to find and install and that automatically update, and that ideally is as recent as possible snaps are a superior way to offer that.