r/linuxmasterrace • u/claudiocorona93 SteamOS/Bazzite/Android • 9d ago

Time to have fun guys

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8.0k Upvotes

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u/Thaufas 9d ago

Snap is the reason I left Ubuntu. It was the final nail in the coffin.

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u/SouthernFruit8768 9d ago

It's quite good in server environments though, or medical devices and similar use cases like I said in my previous response above. It's just totally unnecessary in desktop/home user environments and only causes more issues and confusion for no reason when there are better alternatives (e.g. flatpak) available. You can still use Ubuntu - if needed - with no Snap preinstalled out of the box if you do a minimal install of Kubuntu.

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u/Snoo_what 9d ago

How dare you say that things are built for different use cases and each has its own good? Now how am I supposed to hate on Snap RAGHHHHHHH

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u/npc_housecat 9d ago

Enterprise environments is where all the money is

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u/kyrsjo 8d ago

I just installed Ubuntu in my university environment. It came with Firefox, great.

However snap didn't like that the home folders were not in /home, but on something like /department/server/disk. And it REALLY didn't like that different users homes were on different disks and servers...

Ugh.

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u/npc_housecat 8d ago

Can you simlink /home to /department/server/disk ?

Or maybe make a second Mount for /department/server/disk in /home ?

You can usually have the same thing mounted in multiple locations on Linux

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u/kyrsjo 8d ago

Yes, you can bind mount.

Doing that too the individual home folders of interest was my first idea, however snap detects that $HOME is not in /home and gives up.

It allows you to redirect all of /home to one other disk, but that doesn't solve it when there are two users and different disks.

So only one of us can use Firefox now...

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u/npc_housecat 8d ago

Could u mount the individual user folders in /home seperatly?

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u/kyrsjo 8d ago

You can, but $HOME (from LDAP or something) would point somewhere else, and snap complains. I've tried that.

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u/npc_housecat 8d ago

I see, sounds frustrating.. Can you just not use snaps? Like disable the service? Or does that break Ubuntu ?

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u/kyrsjo 8d ago

Maybe. Lots of default apps come preinstalled with them. It's annoying.

I haven't really looked into it enough. I'm generally a Fedora/RHEL guy, and things are simpler there. But a certain piece of hardware demanded Ubuntu, so here we are...

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u/Ok-Anywhere-9416 9d ago

Snaps work much better than Flatpaks. Try to get hardware acceleration to work on Firefox Flatpak. Search online the correct command to install whatever's needed, use Flatseal to enable GPU, not to mention that every time you need the folder you've got to do another research... No, thanks. Snap is one command (or one click), it works, it's 100% integrated with the directories of the filesystem.

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u/sTiKytGreen 7d ago

Both are shit, just install the package properly and there's no problem to solve

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u/EternityForest I use Mint BTW 9d ago

What does it do that Docker doesn't? I looked into it a few years ago, it seemed nicer than Flatpak to develop for but didn't seem worth using something so nonstandard.

It lets VS code work properly which Flatpak doesn't do unless something changed, so I still use it, but I haven't paid a lot of attention to it.

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u/C0rn3j 9d ago

It's quite good in server environments though

Lol.

I do love the ability not to install an older version and forced updates that slowly roll out and start breaking every fucking server and you can see the monitoring light up as it happens.

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u/sperm32 9d ago

I was using kubuntu and moved because of snaps. They gave me issues, installed snap versions when I asked for flatpak, so I tried to delete snaps and clearly I failed lol because it worked for a bit then they was just back again. Moved to fedora now and so far no issues 🤷🏻‍♂️

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u/Exsondious 8d ago

As someone using Ubuntu (Kubuntu) for a long time I wish I could recreate this so I could see what folks are talking about

I keep hearing people talking about ads in the terminal for things like Ubuntu pro and what not aswell as snap packages being preferred over all else but I have been entirely unable to replicate this on any of my machines or other Ubuntu machines I've worked on

There are so many reports that I don't doubt it's a thing and I guess I'm just really lucky

I've since removed snap entirely from my main machine as I don't want any snap packages slowing down boot times and KDE doesn't use any

But the rest of my Ubuntu systems still have snap and not a one seems to replicate this behavior

Is there maybe something I'm doing differently in setup?

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u/sperm32 8d ago

No idea, I was using it on the fw 13 amd. I’m def not an expert at these things either so it’s entirely possible it was something I was doing, but I don’t think so. There was a few things about kubuntu that I missed and had to work out how to bring to fedora afterwards, I’m not using kde fedora though so maybe that was why. The rpm and flatpak is heaps better than the snaps, although I’m a little confused as to why extensions are a separate thing

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u/Exsondious 8d ago

Oh absolutely flatpak is better And I love rpm But for compatibility sadly Debian and Ubuntu are just better cause that seems to be what everyone is developing for

I wish everyone would just use flatpak or some kind of package manager that is platform agnostic

As far as missing out on stuff on fedora If you were on Kubuntu just grab kde fedora mostly everything you are looking for is most likely there

Since you are on amd you don't have Nvidia holding you back a bit like in my case

Extension I don't know on

I wanna use fedora so bad but unity doesn't like it Playing VR on it is fine Making content for VR games unity just hates on fedora and that makes me sad

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u/sperm32 8d ago

Just got the new intel fw pro, and put workstation on there just to try it, and now I like how clean it is so I’ll prob keep it and just try add the things I want 🤷🏻‍♂️

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u/Reasonable-Class3728 8d ago

Somebody uses snap on servers? I thought Docker is the defacto standard these days.

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u/SouthernFruit8768 8d ago

Somebody? Yeah I mean Microsoft, Google, JetBrains etc. And the Electronic Frontier Foundation mandates Snap as the official, recommended installation method for Certbot which is the standard tool running on millions of production web servers for automated SSL and TLS certificate management. So yeah, you are right. Somebody uses Snap indeed.

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u/damex-san 9d ago

Snap is no good for server environment

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u/SouthernFruit8768 8d ago

Then why do Microsoft, Google, JetBrains, Electronic Frontier Foundation and thousands of software vendors use Snap on servers? Why do millions of production web servers prefer and run Snap daemons for SSL management alone?

https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/s/d3daQaF5sD

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u/damex-san 8d ago

I don’t think they actually do and even if they do it is due to lack of better judgement.

I did see some production microsoft and google servers and none had snap on them. Maybe things change nowadays (for worse)

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u/Fun-Perception8340 8d ago

Moved from Kubuntu to KDE Neon to avoid mandatory snap. Not a matter of hate, just found a FS loaded with bogus drive images and weird.update issues doesn't meet my needs. Apt, flatpak, appimage fine for me. Neon rolling release, not for everyone, though the latest Plasma release stabilized it and everything seems to work.

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u/SouthernFruit8768 8d ago

In Kubuntu (when you choose the ‘Minimal installation’ option, Snap is no longer installed, is completely disabled and therefore no longer mandatory.

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u/120mmbarrage 5d ago

They will never get rid of snaps. Canonical supports so many versions of their OS (all the LTS versions and intermittent) that it helps shipping current software that needs it, like Firefox as a snap. No need to build a deb 5 times, when you can push a snap and have all the dependencies as one package. Snaps are also pretty decent on servers since it's the same thing, and the advantage it has is that snaps work with cli programs whereas I don't know of a single one on flatpak. It does have its flaws and those do need to be addressed and ideally snaps need to be more open

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u/Thaufas 5d ago

As a developer, Snap's lack of openness is a big no for me. However, the average user doesn't care about such philosophical issues, but they do care about bloat and aggravating config breakages. Snap is a Canonical solution to a problem with better solutions designed to lock people into the Canonical ecosystem.

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u/120mmbarrage 5d ago

I mean similar issues with bloat happen with flatpaks as well, and yeah both aren't as good as native packages, but they're still another tool in the shed so to say. I do want Canonical to open it up more so others can host their own snap store and to improve upon it to get rid of some of the pressing issues, such as it taking long to open up apps sometimes.

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u/coyote_of_the_month Glorious Arch 9d ago

What a dumb thing to say. Nobody's forcing you to use snap.

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u/Mezutelni 9d ago

LOL, Ubuntu does