We have thousands of bug reports. Just like any Open Source project, we prioritise them. Sometimes we miss them, sometimes bugs are not fixed for a long time. This is a function of being popular, and having a limited number of developers to work on things.
Absolute rubbish. You’ve personally spent a considerable amount of time discussing issues here and elsewhere. You could have invested that time in understanding how to file a bug, and file it. Have a conversation with the developer, get them to understand the issues and work together on a solution.
Repeating yourself on a forum ad infinitum is akin to shouting into the wind. If all our developers spent all day reading and responding to threads on forums no bugs would get fixed. We have many examples of users who applied themselves a little to understand how to file a bug and got their problems understood.
You have no idea. I personally spend time trying to understand these performance issues (I am not a developer on snapd) so we can articulate the issues in bug reports and get them prioritised with the relavent developers. Don’t believe for a second we don’t care. It’s just these aren’t simple bugs to solve.
A useful single datapoint.
While useful for some expert users. Most normal people don’t like the process of downloading random zip files and running the contents. It’s not a pleasant solution to run all your applications like that.
Repeating yourself like this isn’t going to get anything fixed. Please appreciate that.
That agreed, if this is a forum. I thought it is a discourse.
The dafault snaps are quite slow is another simple datapoint! The tone of argument tells that it is not going to be solved.
People have been doing that for decades. People don’t like to be just click and point people. One most important reason for people to look in the Linux world is to explore. Anyone, who would download a Linux distro and install it had already done something more than a “normal” person would do.
Look. We know there’s a problem for some snaps in some circumstances where they may not launch fast. I appreciate that this is a significant issue for you. I will continue to raise it as an issue with the developers. Please bear with us.
I do get the reason with packaging chromium as a snap, and kind of the reason to bundle some system apps to try snaps on all ubuntu installs, however I feel it’s not quite there yet for them. Stuff like calculator and system monitor is those type of apps you don’t always open, but when you do they should launch immidiatly, but I’m hopeful for the launch times to be fixed. Another small problem with those apps is that snaps currently don’t integrate with the gnome search. When installing the deb of calculator I can open gnome dash and just type 1+1 to get the result, not with the snap.
Also installing KDE software as snaps is way better then bloating up the system with all the crap KDE use as dependencys, another nice thing is that they use the KDE breeze theme and looks way better then installing and running them as debs on default ubuntu since QT apps don’t integrate with the theme well as it is.
The file dialog would be nice if they could use GTK one though.
I also install VLC as a snap, works great but it looks awful and uses a real crappy file dialog.
I sure hope snaps are here to stay and the kinks gets ironed out.
I did not plan to post here since its off topic, but i’d like to add one data point from my current employer. We have a large number of people who have been switching to Ubuntu from MacOS or Windows and snaps have been very useful for our internal use. Company policy dictates using the LTS version for stability (very understandable since it eases the overhead for the IT team), but snaps have filled the gap in many places. Some applications that were initially used via PPAs are now used via snaps and the experience is much nicer as users are able to find the applications in the software center without having to hunt for PPAs online.
Overall in the last year or so since my employer switched more people to Ubuntu Bionic i’ve very rarely hear people complain about snaps. Most of them don’t even notice some inconsistencies where certain snaps don’t use the cursor themes etc and the average user is just happy that the applications they want to use are available to install easily.
For personal use as well, snaps were something that brought be back to using Ubuntu again. I like the fact that they can be used for both Graphical and console applications. The fact that they seem to have buy-in from some bigger players for developer tooling is an added bonus (I’m able to install docker, vscode, postgresql etc via snap without having to add an external PPA that could potentially break when i update Ubuntu).
Long story short, i just want to thank the maintainers for their continued work on Snap and i’ll continue to use it and hopefully contribute with code soon as well. I think the user experience around snap will get better with time, specially once more people can use it and provide feedback. I’m hoping that at some point snap could be leveraged to provide a OS experience similar to Fedora silverblue where snap is used to provide most applications and provide an immutable OS, easy snapshots with rollbacks etc.
Fedora Silverbue doesn’t use snaps.
There’s also another distro making way to provide an immutable OS called Clear Linux, which uses bundles and flatpaks, optimised for Intel hardware.
My bad, i phrased it in a weird way. I meant that just like Fedora silverblue has an immutable os built on top of ostree/flatpaks, it might be interesting to have some version of ubuntu built using snaps.
Yes, of course. It should be like Silverblue or Clear Linux or something like that, without a mix of debs and snaps. They say they don’t have enough people.
This exists since 2015 (a year after snaps started to exist) and is called Ubuntu Core …
It is widely used in IoT. Automation, servers, clouds and as kiosk system in digital-signage, comecially and non-comercially …
There is no desktop version of it currently, but all of the source is indeed available (on github and launchpad) and if someone from the community would want to step up to create a desktop UbuntuCore system nobody would stop you
@ogra Thanks for sharing that! I see that Ubuntu core is available via multipass so i’ll try that out! I’ve been meaning to learn more about snaps etc so this will be a good way to get started with that.
Exactly, as you guessed “make it work slowly” is probably not the goal/reason why it was made available as a snap. What’s the point of that comment then?
Some of the motivations to make it available as a snap (most have been mentioned here before)
less packaging work (one snaps for all distributions/series)
the snap infrastructure make it trivial to build on every git commit without manual work, when we don’t have a such system for debs
users of older distributions can try/use newer versions (often new GNOME apps depends on a newer gtk which isn’t available)
easy to rollback to an older revision/serie in case of problems
increased security
etc
Yes, the calculator is a small application, but it does make sense to transition some easy things first and learn from the experience before attacking more challenging projetcs…
If you want to test the calculator, you could do so without pre-installing the default snap.
Moreover, we can’t have big applications one day snap by default, I repeat: deb packages must remain the heart of Ubuntu!
Universal packages (flatpak, snap, appimage) should not be the default choice for software installation and even less pre-installed by default.
Snap should only be used if the software cannot be easily installed in the traditional way. Absolutely nothing justifies using a popular software like Firefox, Chromium, VLC, LibreOffice… in Snap!
You keep repeating that in loop, we read you the first time and understood your position, thanks for sharing it. That’s a personal opinion and not backed up by reality though.
From what we know, our users want applications easily to install, secure and which have no risk to break they base system. They want to be able to get the newest libreoffice on xenial or bionic without having to dist upgrade to a non LTS serie. They also want the desktop itself to improve and be better, which we can achieve by spending less time doing packaging work where it’s not needed.
Now you stated your position enough, we replied to your message in details and explained our motivations. You might disagree with what is being done and why but we went round several time on the topic, the Ubuntu team isn’t going to do the no-default-snap thing you wish we would so please accept that and move on. You are free to move to another distribution if you are on a fundamental disagreement with what is being done here but please do respect that the people doing the time/energy/money investment to build the system get to decide on the direction.
And to close the snap topic, we will have a proper look to our snaps for the incoming LTS and do what is best for Ubuntu/users. We will put effort in trying to fix the startup slowness issue, but if that is still not good enough I think reverting the calculator to be the deb by default is an option. (with the understanding that the calculator is a small app easy to maintain, with little security risks and which isn’t moving much so users usually are fine to not get newer series. We will not revisit cases like chromium where there is strong technical & resourcing reasons for the snap solution)
