Ludovic Courtès
I discovered Ubuntu, 2024 edition (no I’m not switching).
Once installed, it comes with Firefox preinstalled, with the icon showing up in the GNOME dock.
There’s a ‘firefox’ .deb package installed, but hey ‘dpkg -L firefox’ shows that it’s almost empty, with little more than /usr/bin/firefox, and — surprise! — ~/.snap/firefox occupies quite a bit of space. Hmm! 🤔
Ludovic Courtès
Turns out there’s a “fake” (transitional?) ‘firefox’ .deb:
http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/f/firefox/firefox_1snap1-0ubuntu6_amd64.deb
/usr/bin/firefox in that package ends with: exec /snap/bin/firefox "$@".
And ‘debian/firefox.preinst’ basically runs ‘snap install firefox’. QED.
Caleb KE0VVT 🇮🇱🏳️🌈🌱
@civodul I don't touch Ubuntu.
Ludovic Courtès
I found this quite evil because I thought you could still choose between apt and snap. That’s not quite the case.
Anyway, that Firefox packaged who knows how has all the surveillance things turned on: completions by Google in the location bar before history completion, Google as the default search engine, “telemetry”, and of course no ad blocker or anything by default.
This has a very “Windows feel”.
Caleb KE0VVT 🇮🇱🏳️🌈🌱
@vlkr At least Flatpak theoretically can work without the proprietary app store Flathub, and Flathub itself has the option to hide nonfree software. @civodul
vlkr
@civodul I wouldn't be surprised if snap in turn is actually a transitional package that is using flatpak behind the scenes. 😉
Ludovic Courtès
Anecdote: the (pretty) installer would crash badly at the sight of the NTFS partitions or something that were on the target disk. I partitioned it with ‘fdisk’ and then the installer was able to proceed.
I remember of a similar bug that was reported (and fixed) against the Guix System installer a while back; nice to see we’re in good company.
Philip McGrath
@civodul The non-snap option was removed in Ubuntu 22.04, at which point flavors like Kubuntu that hadn’t made the snap their default in 21.10 also had to switch. (This was one of the last straws inducing me to just switch back to Debian and stop trying to make my Ubuntu more Debian-like.) There was a fair amount of public scrutiny at the time, but I guess most anti-snap folks have found their workarounds by now: I don’t really see much ongoing discussion.
Rich Felker
@civodul That's Ubuntu. A bastardized Debian with commercial spyware shit replacing the high quality upstream.
Rich Felker
@civodul "Windows feel" you cited is the ENTIRE POINT if Ubuntu.
futurile
@civodul it's controversial and there's a context ...
The Linux desktop use-base is around 1% of the market. The other 99% use PC's like they use phones.
That's what Snaps are about - apps like apps on phones. Unattended upgrades in geek speak.
Also AppStore not CLI.
Also, reality for end-users is issues around security which again phones have better approaches for.
Finally, commercial ISV's want a single package format for all: 1% of market but 5+ package types is madness for them
Ludovic Courtès
@futurile Seen from a distance, I think a solution would have been to keep using apt exclusively; the “App Center” could very much have apt as a backend.
In the end, it seems that in the hope of getting a share of the remaining 99% of the market, all they achieved is to alienate a subset of the 1% that actually uses it.
Anyway, who am I to judge commercial distros? :-)
futurile
Guix solves the technical issue. Real transactions.
At scale and with general users any form of state will kill you eventually. Push an upgrade out to 50 million users and you'll always see a percentage that goes bad. If the user can't reverse out you're screwed.
Deb/RPM weren't designed for that kind of use-case. For their users "ssh and fix it" is fine. Not for the general public 'user' - who need a big UNDO button.
SUSE simulate transactions with btrfs snapshots but it's icky
Ludovic Courtès
@futurile Oh right, I didn’t see it from that perspective (that using snap was a way to have a form of transactional upgrade/rollback).
But yes, I do think they’d be better off rebasing on top of Guix or NixOS (Mark, if you read this, we can talk. ;-)).
(They could even display ads while ‘guix pull’ is running!)
Ekaitz Zárraga 👹
@civodul when you try to install things with apt it suggests you to use snap instead and so on... pretty crazy
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