Ubuntu Snap update spoiled my World Cup Final

https://www.circusscientist.com/2022/12/18/ubuntu-snap-update-spoiled-the-world-cup/

by tomjuggler • 4 years ago

206 217 4 years ago

Snaps are certainly a cursed technology. I've had one update in production and break things outside of our regular release process.

amelius2• 4 years ago

I mean, providing executables is probably the main purpose of a Linux distro. Ubuntu is playing with their raison d'etre.

pitched• 4 years ago

Site seems to be having trouble keeping up right now: https://archive.ph/Hnr8P

tomjuggler2• 4 years ago

Thanks - my $5 server is struggling, yes. Time to look at Cloudflare? Or maybe just a static blog like Jekyll..

daguava• 4 years ago

Free tier of cloudflare and the cache everything setting + maybe a page rule or so will probably do most of what you want.

bauruine3• 4 years ago

You could also use e.g. nginx to cache the site you don't need Cloudflare for that.

renewiltord3• 4 years ago

Cloudflare is trivial to set up. You should definitely use it. If you use a mainstream static site generator, you can just deploy to Cloudflare Pages as well.

CSDude3• 4 years ago

Snap is an abomination. See my previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33173762

I fought with a guy in 2015 that believed snap was the future, and this cost me almost my job back then.

vbezhenar• 4 years ago

I don't see snaps being phased out. I don't like them either, but there're plenty of abomination technologies being the future. The whole web might be one of them.

throwaway0x7E62• 4 years ago

based

forgotpwd16• 4 years ago

* Oh, you want to install a package, here are two very distant versions in snap and apt. Select one!

Well, Canonical has your back on that with apt installing snap packages.

CSDude3• 4 years ago

That is immediate trigger to rm -Rf /

dunefox• 4 years ago

How did this almost cost you your job?

CSDude3• 4 years ago

Ugly politics, guy was just trying to delay timeline

mesebrec3• 4 years ago

Snaps don't update when the app is running. I don't know what happened here, but it seems the problem might be somewhere else.

josephcsible4• 4 years ago

If that goes on for 2 weeks, doesn't it kill the app and update anyway?

mesebrec3• 4 years ago

If you ignore the notifications for two weeks, yes. But you even get a notification at least four hours before updating saying you have little time left.

That said, if you run `snap hold firefox`, it will wait indefinitely.

justsomehnguy• 4 years ago

Are you the same people who bitched when Win10 just restarted to install updates?

Yes this comment has a little malice in it.

m4632• 4 years ago

it is extremely hard to disable or remove tracking or auto-update stuff on ubuntu.

(snapd, unattended-upgrades, ubuntu-report, whoopsie, ubuntu-advantage-tools, motd and more)

mesebrec3• 4 years ago

You turn automatic snap updates off by running `snap hold`.

Avamander7• 4 years ago

You shouldn't be disabling unattended-upgrades unless you're very diligent with security updates yourself.

Avamander7• 4 years ago

That's a fairly recent addition, after a very long time without any notifications and abysmal handling of a running application. These issues were handled slow and dismissively, the current solution is still half-baked. It's yet another good example how bad Snap is.

timbit429• 4 years ago

Auto updating is only one of the multiple problems Snaps create. Read the other comments here to see many of them.

I can't wait for Snaps to crash, burn and die.

amelius2• 4 years ago

Heh, I just tried to fire up a Snap instance of FreeCad on a remote machine (because snap on the local machine was broken). Got an "X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication", even though xeyes started just fine. It seems to be yet another Snap limitation.

Found this thread from more than 2 years ago:

https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/x11-connection-rejected-because...

renewiltord3• 4 years ago

Crazy game for sure. The best WC ever (or over the last 20 anyway). This is a classic UX problem with automation: there are times when you don't know the operating condition. It's better to prompt with opt-out.

Mac OS prompts, and that's better than anything else.

Snaps are also abysmally slow. And while I'm complaining, they also occupy my `mount` output so that's annoying.

d1sxeyes• 4 years ago

The last 20 WC covers pretty much all of living memory, and I doubt many of us on here are qualified to talk about more than 5-10 WCs.

2006 I remember Italy v France was very exciting.

1954 was supposedly pretty exciting with allegations of doping, blatent fouling, and a very dodgy offside call against Puskas.

'58 was also supposedly pretty exciting (certainly a lot of goals)

'66 was a great one for me as a Brit, but also interesting because of the stolen trophy, yet more doping. The match itself was also tense, with a last minute free-kick pushing the match to extra time, the first (and only) hat trick every scored in a WC final, the controversial third goal and the final goal scored while the pitch was being invaded.

'90 was interesting because of the sheer dirtiness of play.

'98 is interesting for me because it's the first World cup I really remember following closely, but not particularly noteworthy as these things go.

That said, 2022 was a very exciting final and will go down in World Cup History.

And definitely nothing should kill a browser without explicit user confirmation.

iso1631• 4 years ago

It's odd because I have firefox snap on ubuntu 2204 on my laptop, an annoying popup crops up occasionally, but the only thing I've ever had kill firefox is oom-killer.

renewiltord3• 4 years ago

Over the last 20 years hahaha not last 20 WCs. I've only seen the last 20 y worth.

unethical_ban2• 4 years ago

Was there ever a time when faking injuries like a toddler wasn't an integral, unpunished part of the game?

I like watching the WC because soccer is interesting enough to see once per Olympiad on the world stage. The final today had some amazing shows of talent and teamwork, but it is primally revolting to me to watch grown men writhe in faux agony with one eye on the ref, when their opponent's foot whiffed some air past their shin.

DuckFeathers• 4 years ago

I always disable auto-updates on my PCs. The OS has no business installing anything on it's schedule, or in any schedule. I do it on mine as I go. I just have update notifications and I install them manually when I feel like it.

Also, it is bizarre that they desinged a software delivery system with no option to disable auto-updates... and only adding the option now.

And the fact that Firefox frooze during the update is also strange. Not sure if it's a snap problem or Firefox problem.

As a long-time Firefox and Linux user (started using Firefox when it was alpha version and Linux around 2002), the best decision I made around 3 years ago was move to Windows and Edge.

pmontra5• 4 years ago

Latest time I checked it was impossible not to update Windows. The best I could do was to postpone the updates by 180 days. That was Windows 10.

bfrog• 4 years ago

Snap is terrible. Trying to solve the problem the wrong way. See nix/guix for how it’s done right.

hinata08• 4 years ago

To the defence of Snap, I have the same issues on my Firefox installed with PPA

(Firefox updates at random time, then kindly asks to reboot by replacing each webpage by a grey one with a restart button, and it doesn't restart tabs in private windows)

It's a very Firefox problem, not snap

(I use PPA and not Snap because snap outright doesn't work when your home isn't /home/uname , and mine is /home/company_domain/uname ) (I can't believe that ubuntu forces you to use a software that isn't production ready)

capableweb• 4 years ago

I'm mostly using Firefox on Arch and it doesn't suffer from this problem. It updates when I want it to update, meaning when I do my daily update with my distros package manager.

prmoustache• 4 years ago

Same with most distros.

It really is a ubuntu problem.

asddubs• 4 years ago

i've had the same thing happen in both chromium and firefox. what i hate most about snap though is the constant popups telling me the close the application. but closing the application doesn't actually trigger it updating, it basically wants you to close the application and then wait several hours until their cron job to update or whatever runs again. so I just get these constant pop ups

Izkata3• 4 years ago

From what I've heard (haven't done this myself yet) if you install Firefox manually instead of through a package manager, it has an internal update mechanism that doesn't trigger the "please restart" page. That page is for when a package manager swaps files out from under it, while the internal mechanism waits for you to restart.

rascul• 4 years ago

From what I've heard (haven't done this myself yet) if you install Firefox manually instead of through a package manager, it has an internal update mechanism that doesn't trigger the "please restart" page.

I install Firefox in such a manner and can confirm the behavior is what you have heard. I've never seen the "please restart" page.

greatgib2• 4 years ago

I hate Snap, but from what I experienced, I also don't think that the problem is related to it but some shitty logic in Firefox.

Regarding the "excuse" that it is the package manager that updated the Firefox in background, I saw it repeated a lot of time to deflect the blame, but it is totally not true in my opinion. On my system, I don't allow automatic updates. I have the notification when updates are available, but the system/packages are never updated without me doing it. And still, I noticed multiple times that Firefox breaks suddenly, like that, when nothing was updated on my system for some weeks and everything was working fine.

semi-extrinsic• 4 years ago

On Arch Linux the Firefox installed via the package manager has never auto-updated and never shown this "please restart" page. But probably the official packaging on Arch resembles a manual install on Ubuntu.

AnIdiotOnTheNet• 4 years ago

Also seems to work that way for the FlatPak version, for what it is worth. I also have never seen the please restart page.

d110af5ccf• 4 years ago

The weird thing is that the restart doesn't (usually?) seem to be necessary for it to function, only for you to receive the underlying security update. I learned this because there's a bug where if you have multiple profiles running simultaneously only the main one shows the restart screen.

When I found this out it really pissed me off so I tried to figure out where the restart screen showed up in the source code so I could patch it out. But I'm not familiar with the code base and left off after a bit of digging because I really can't justify the time spent.

In reality I end up holding back Firefox updates with my package manager until I'm ready to restart it. In the end I will thwart developers trying to dictate things to me. The software on my computer works for me, not the other way around. A lot of developers seem to be far too arrogant and forget this basic fact.

johannes1234321• 4 years ago

(Firefox updates at random time, then kindly asks to reboot by replacing each webpage by a grey one with a restart button, and it doesn't restart tabs in private windows)

I understand why they push so storngly to frequent updates and consider that idea mostly as good. However that implementation always makes me furious. I am in some workflow, doing some form of transactional thing and suddenly it decides to stop working without restart, where then half my work is gone. If they'd say "hey, new update ready update in next few hours" I'd be fine and could schedule it (well I would still not like it as I hoard too many open tabs thus restart takes time ... but could tolerate)

eikenberry• 4 years ago

If you're using a PPA then it shouldn't update on it's own and give you the restart screen. It should only update when you run an update with your package manager. How did you set it up so that it has this problem?

ilyt• 4 years ago

Works fine under Debian although you have to load package from "unstable" (not really unstable 99.99% of the time) branch to get newest one

throwaway0x7E62• 4 years ago

(Firefox updates at random time, then kindly asks to reboot by replacing each webpage by a grey one with a restart button, and it doesn't restart tabs in private windows)

that happened to me several years ago despite automatic updates being explicitly turned off - I actually have a screenshot of the settings page next to that gray one

remram2• 4 years ago

That's just false. It doesn't update, you have to run APT to do it.

Now if you run 'apt upgrade' and hit 'yes' without looking, you might be updating Firefox while it's running. Or maybe you use unattended-upgrades. Either way, not a Firefox issue.

jeroenhd2• 4 years ago

Firefox doesn't update itself. Your automatic background updates update Firefox.

Consider going to your settings and changing your update preferences. Firefox only shows the "please restart" page when it's already been updated, in your case (from a PPA) by something else like your OS upgrade service.

It'll also keep your existing tabs working as best it can, only new tabs will show the restart page. You should restart anyway because the underlying libraries have been swapped out from under Firefox while it's running that makes Firefox VERY crash prone for very obvious reasons.

benibela• 4 years ago

I have the problem in combination with both

I have uninstalled Snap Firefox and installed PPA Firefox

Suddenly it updates, and when I restart, the PPA Firefox is gone! It is back to the Snap Firefox

Also the Snap Firefox does not start, because I use a user that is not in the snap group. So after each update, I have to uninstall it and reinstall the PPA one

How do I disable the snap updates permanently?

j1elo• 4 years ago

They went to Arch, which is fine, although quite a steep change in the baseline system. New package manager, new update cadence, new "way to do things".

Another alternative with much less change would have been Linux Mint: it still is a fine-tuned Ubuntu, but without the Snap Store.

Mikeb85• 4 years ago

Yeah, Snap updates seem cursed for the newest Ubuntu.

I'm on Fedora these days, can't see ever leaving it the way things are going. It's rock solid and seems to be driving the state of the art in Linux things...

timbit429• 4 years ago

Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu/Debian but doesn't have Snaps.

alkonaut• 4 years ago

Can someone explain what’s going on here? Is there a design mistake here? Does the app update in-place rather than side by side so it simply launches the updated version on next launch?

If it’s side by side then why does it even affect the old version it force a restart? And if it’s not side by side then who the hell designed it?

neilv• 4 years ago

Snap getting more invasive was the final straw, which led me to move a startup away from Ubuntu LTS, to Debian Stable.

(Was already leaning towards moving, because a rough monitoring of security updates over several months showed Debian was strangely more trustworthy. Snap making things even worse for some of our systems made the decision easier.)

napsterbr• 4 years ago

It was the last straw for me, as well. More specially, the annoying notifications telling me to update Firefox or "it will automatically update in 13 days". I don't know what was supposed to happen, but these notifications kept showing up for several months.

dogmatism• 4 years ago

Debian stable with flatpak and appimage is a good way to go

voidfunc2• 4 years ago

Snap is a pile or garbage and I really wish Ubuntu would just stop trying to be a little different all the time. They learned their lesson with Upstart but I guess it'll be a few releases until the abandon Snap.

pbhjpbhj• 4 years ago

Hmm, it's good to try to be different, bit they certainly shouldn't push "different" stuff when it doesn't even work yet. I've not minded the transition to systemd, for example. Snap has been awful, I don't like it and every time it's pushed that bit more I feel like Canonical are behaving like Microsoft somewhat.

Debian is looking attractive.

Abandoning snap is not enough, it's more about respecting users ... but they are obviously under no obligations to me, I'm not paying.

ethbr0• 4 years ago

Ubuntu moving window control buttons to the left circa 10.x was that straw for me.

Not because it necessarily made anything harder, but because it was an arrogant change for no goddamned reason.

UX should start with humility -- if you change things that lots of people are used to then you'd better have some damn good reasons.

kevin_thibedeau• 4 years ago

Canonical is doing a great job replicating the BOFH. It's an integral part of the traditional *nix experience.

Tsiklon2• 4 years ago

Mir would have been a better thing to point out as a poor technical decision. But Upstart came out before SystemD and was used by other distros, most notably RHEL5 + 6.

voidfunc2• 4 years ago

I totally forgot about Mir.

worik3• 4 years ago

Unity. Especially the first version

torginus2• 4 years ago

I'm not sure about that - Wayland hasn't exactly been a runaway success either.

The 2 key issues with Wayland, the fact that it's a protocol, meaning a lot of stuff needs to be handled by the window manager that was handled by the platform before, and its opinionated design, that made it very hard to port software that wasn't designed exactly how it wanted to be, meant adoption was (and is) very slow, and still kind of ongoing.

Mir didn't have these issues.

marcodiego• 4 years ago

They learned their lesson with Upstart

Upstart worked well for its purpose. It gave me zero problems and a faster boot until systemd came along. It was a good stop gap solution and was adopted by other distros including ChromeOS.

People like to criticize the "different on the block" and although I think most of these complaints are for good reasons, so much is learned from these mistakes that we should not be so avert to them.

I don't think snaps are better than flatpaks, but I'm glad there is an alternative to it under a different management and having a good influence over it (IIUC, "portals" were born in snaps, not in flatpaks).

Broker0• 4 years ago

I like the conclusion. Factor 'X' messed up my 'Y', going back to previous solution.

guiambros• 4 years ago

Snap is a disaster, and full of problematic structural decisions that are now really hard to fix (e.g. [1]).

I've decided to delay my upgrade to 22.04 given Canonical's increasingly aggressive push towards Snap, and now I'm considering moving to Arch or some other distribution.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1575053

input_sh• 4 years ago

Funny thing is the biggest Ubuntu derivatives (elementary OS, Linux Mint, Pop! OS) are all going against Ubuntu on this one and shipping with flatpak support.

Avamander7• 4 years ago

I wish things like lubuntu, kubuntu, kde neon would also adopt the same or rebase themselves on top of Debian.

Avamander7• 4 years ago

(e.g. [1])

Canonical employees in that thread have repeatedly said they basically don't care about the opinion of the people affected. The latest reasoning provided being that they don't have the resources...

But either they have so little resources they shouldn't be pushing snap in its current form at all or they're lying (and the former reason still applies).

Either case it's disappointing and will slowly destroy all the goodwill they had.

kybernetyk• 4 years ago

I am going back to Arch. My computer is my computer, and I don’t care anymore how much work it takes, I’m going to take charge so nothing like this ever happens again.

From my experience the only real work load with Arch was the set up. Once I installed it and configured everything to my liking there has been nearly 0 work with maintaining the system. I've been running my installation of Arch since 2016 and the system didn't break even once.

manchmalscott2• 4 years ago

I recently switched back to arch, and when I updated my xorg a few days later, a few things started crashing (notably godot) with a “[xcb] Unknown sequence number while processing queue”, so as much as I love arch I definitely wouldn’t call it “nearly 0 work” unless you just never update.

stevenhuang• 4 years ago

Unlucky, looks like it was an libx11 upstream bug. Has since been fixed as of a few hours ago at least.

silisili2• 4 years ago

Same. I love their archiso, you can build your own little custom live ISO. I put Gnome and networking on mine, then install via a terminal shell window.

The only reason I reinstall is when I upgrade my box every 2 or 3 years. Years ago Arch was a bit more finicky, but today it's been perfectly stable for me, doing updates every Friday.

mort963• 4 years ago

I agree, Arch is amazing. I haven't been using it for a few years, I've been on Ubuntu in an attempt to be closer to how a "normal computer user" would experience Linux. But every single time Ubuntu Softwate messed something up, every single time I get a notification to close Firefox in <13 days to avoid disruptions, every time I click the "update all" button on Ubuntu Software and it tells me it can't because the Snap Store is running (as a background process which I can't close through the UI), I get the urge to go back. At this point, it's only inertia which keeps me on Ubuntu, I don't want to take the time to set stuff up anew. But at this rate, I'm sure I'll finally make the switch sooner rather than later.

I'm not philosophically against Snap as an idea. But what I am against is all the absolutely terrible UX decisions and bugs which Canonical evidently considers "acceptable". It makes the whole Linux desktop look like a joke.

Maybe it's time to realise it is a joke. That Linux will remain a programmer OS and an OS for locked-down consumer devices, but not a general consumer desktop-style OS. And maybe we should recognise that in such a world, there is no space for Ubuntu Desktop.

emj3• 4 years ago

I never have a problem with this, but I do shutdown my computer everyday. I do actually use arch as well but a lot less than Ubuntu and Debian, my feeling is that Arch is a lot more trouble than Ubuntu and Debian. I am very conservative with my desktop I always want to be able to work, I've had zero problems with that attitude running Ubuntu since it was just an idea. All problems I've had were self inflicted and there are many foot guns for sure.

Enginerrrd• 4 years ago

Same experience.

Arch has been nearly maintenance free, and it's been the one distribution where when I did break something, I was able to fix it 100% without nuking and starting over.

I still can't bring myself to run it on servers for some reason, and I go back to Debian stable for those, but honestly, I'm not sure why. I'm starting to feel that a rolling release would make for a lower maintenance server because it's always a PITA when the inevitable end-of-life comes into play and the upgrade inevitably fails and I have to reconfigure everything anyways.

Ubuntu in contrast would ALWAYS find new and bizarre ways to break. ESPECIALLY when snap came into play.

choward• 4 years ago

Might I suggest NixOS. Same benefits. Auto-updates are disabled by default. But even if they do happen it's not going to try to mess with currently running processes. In fact, the old version will still be installed just no longer to default. You could even run both simultaneously (using two separate config directories otherwise you get warnings). Snap seems like a huge regression in the Linux ecosystem.

rendaw• 4 years ago

Jumping on this bandwagon, running it for 10 years now and the last 5 years or so I've touched more or less nothing (aside from updates) and had no issues.

tsukurimashou• 4 years ago

same here, I've been using arch for years both at home and for work, I love rolling release!

I'm using bspwm no DE, but I'm considering trying Arch+GNOME now that I've been forced to move to Ubuntu for work with my new job.

aaaa4444• 4 years ago

The update process broke a few times for me in Arch. Only been using it for a couple of years.

timbit429• 4 years ago

If you want to keep dpkg, apt, DEBs, etc., you can use Linux Mint, which doesn't have Snaps, unless you add it.

This also lets you download and install DEBs manually from projects that support Debian or Ubuntu DEBs but aren't in the official repos yet.

Darmody• 4 years ago

That's why the first thing you do once Ubuntu is installed is remove snap completely.

It's sad that now we have to fight against the OS like on Windows.

doodlesdev• 4 years ago

You don't, you still have the option to switch distros. Stop being a slave to Canonica. With Ubuntu and Snap, Linux is no better than Windows. Try Linux Mint, Debian, Fedora, Arch, openSUSE. Options is something we're not short on in the Linux space.

timbit429• 4 years ago

But when you remove Snaps, how do you install the apps Snap was providing? I recommend Linux Mint which has no Snaps and everything is in the repo as normal.

silisili2• 4 years ago

At this point I have trouble feeling sympathy. All of us former and some current users have been outlining the problems with snap for years, this one included.

Just find any HN thread (or probably Reddit and Twitter threads) about ubuntu or snaps from the last few years and you'll see.

At this point it's akin to starting smoking today then acting shocked when you get lung cancer.

thot_experiment4• 4 years ago

Snap is awful, no arguments there. I think the more important thing here is that the very idea that something should update itself is so incredibly insanely broken and I cannot for the life of me understand why it's the norm.

The number of times I've been hacked and suffered a data loss is astronomically small compared to the number of times I've had something update and suffered a data loss, or more importantly the number of times I've had something update and cause a regression or break something. Then I have to spend my precious time bringing something that was PREVIOUSLY IN A WORKING STATE back to a working state, which is one of the most infuriating feelings.

bombolo3• 4 years ago

Doesn't apt also update itself?

f1refly2• 4 years ago

Apt updates itself if you instruct it to, the updates also won't restart anything by themselves. I don't think unattended upgrades are enabled on debian or on ubuntu.

charcircuit4• 4 years ago

I cannot for the life of me understand why it's the norm.

If updates were not automatic a large number of people would not upgrade and would not receive important security updates along with various fixes and new features. If a user keeps running into a bug that has already been patched in a newer version that user will just think your software is bad and they will not realize that this poor experience they are having is because they are on an old version.

The number of times I've been hacked and suffered a data loss is astronomically small

Being hacked even once is a bad thing. It is something that the industry tries to minimize as much as possible.

the number of times I've had something update and suffered a data loss

Personally I have not experienced this, but it sounds like this would still happen when you update later. This is why doing gradual updates of rollouts and collecting telemetry is important. It is very useful in being able to detect a bad update and stop it from going out. Unfortunately, the Linux ecosystem is still behind the rest of the industry which leads to people having a poor user experience.

tttttt5ts2• 4 years ago

Is this response generated by ChatGPT? Seriously, we are talking Linux here and this is a generic response that ignores audience.

jrm4• 4 years ago

100%.

Ubuntu doesn't seem to realize (or simply doesn't care that) enterprise servers and user desktops are entirely different beasts.

bobmaxup3• 4 years ago

snap keeps the last three revisions, doesn't it?

lmm• 4 years ago

Maybe. Good luck figuring out what the method to run them is this week.

abdullahkhalids• 4 years ago

Firefox on the release channel downloads updates automatically. And it applies the updates when you next restart the browser. This does not interrupt your browsing in any way. Which I think is fair decision for a browser with a large attack surface.

Most other software should only update when specifically instructed to.

aliraheem3• 4 years ago

The biggest problem is that Firefox updates the next time you open the app, without warning.

That's not a sane decision. Sane would be to update on closing.

Same way Windows offers to "Update and Shutdown" (you don't need the PC anymore why don't I under after you walk away) and not "Update on next Start up" (I'll wait until you need me to get in your way).

jimmygrapes• 4 years ago

Just yesterday any new tabs I opened refused to load until I restarted Firefox due to a forced update. Existing tabs became unresponsive. Granted, it did restore my session upon restart, but it did not restore the DOM and data state of those tabs.

reisse3• 4 years ago

I see the "Firefox has updated, you must restart Firefox to continue using it" window every two weeks or so on Ubuntu.

Though I never seen it on Fedora or Windows, might be some quirks related to Ubuntu packaging.

franga20002• 4 years ago

Unfortunately, this breaks horribly if you're on a shitty network (for example I work a lot on the train) and/or slow hardware. The update check delays browser startup for more than a minute when connected to wifi with no internet (this happens a lot when going through rural areas) and the update after closing function has also burned me a few times when I closed the last window, then remembered I needed to check one last thing, but had to wait several minutes for the update to do its thing (a combination of old laptop, slow internet and many other things using resources).

signaru• 4 years ago

I wasn't able to verify how FF actually behaved under snap, but snap's confusing notifications was enough to make it annoying. After failed tweaks, I'm glad that I no longer have to deal with this since I already purged FF that comes with Ubuntu and just used the binary from Mozilla's site instead.

yazzku2• 4 years ago

This is not my experience on Ubuntu. It updates while I'm using Firefox. I then open a tab and get the stupid message saying that welp, you need to restart that browser boy because isn't this a great UX?

I don't think this is a fair decision. Virtually nothing requires such a forced update. And the browser should be sandboxed by the OS anyway.

hysan• 4 years ago

I’m not so sure that they only download. On macOS, Firefox (and Chrome) sometimes stop working in odd ways when they do the background ”download”. For example, file pickers stop functioning or tabs stop loading. All of this starts working again after restarting and letting it update. It’s happens more than a handful of times every year. Enough so that I’ve picked up on the pattern that it only happens when I see it say “update” by the settings menu.

andreareina• 4 years ago

On my Ubuntu system it applies the update while still open. Then I open a new tab to do something and I'm told I have to restart.

marssaxman• 4 years ago

This does not interrupt your browsing in any way.

That's not been my experience. I don't know what system you're using, but with Firefox on Ubuntu, I discover that Mozilla has put out another (goddamn) update (again, already, goddamnit!) when all my tabs suddenly crash, forcing me to restart the browser.

forrestthewoods• 4 years ago

I think the more important thing here is that the very idea that something should update itself is so incredibly insanely broken and I cannot for the life of me understand why it's the norm.

Eek hard disagree.

Most things I want to auto-update. Preferably at 4am. Somethings I want to disable auto-update.

What I never want is things to update when I’m in the middle of something.

antiframe• 4 years ago

It sounds like you want to control a policy of when things should update. For example Firefox every 4am, Kernel when you say so, Python 2.6 never, etc. I understand "something should update itself" to mean that the user doesn't get to set the policy, it does.

ezfe2• 4 years ago

macOS never interrupts the user, for example. Even if you click the install button, if you (X) out of the "restarting" notification it won't restart/install the update.

ezfe2• 4 years ago

This is a big reason why macOS snapshots your disk before an update. If you ever have a problem, reboot to recovery mode and you'll see a "Restore backup" entry from just before your update that will instantly revert the system to the previous version.

worik3• 4 years ago

the very idea that something should update itself is so incredibly insanely broken and I cannot for the life of me understand why it's the norm.

Yes. For user orientated interactive systems it is mad.

But it has its uses, IMO, for IoT devices.

It was the reason I do not use Ubuntu on my personal computer. If I were in the business of building connected devices I would be interested.

wodenokoto• 4 years ago

Because everything is connected to the internet and what was once working is now a security liability not just to your machine but to other connected machines.

aborsy• 4 years ago

I have a snap installation of nextcloud. It has self updated for years with no problem. The set up took almost no time. Canonical tests the package before releasing it in their OS.

Compared to bare metal and docker installation that were broken every few months and required maintenance, I have been pretty happy with snap.

Based on this, would say snap is not a bad idea. Sure snaps might be slow, but that’s improving.

I don’t have time to tweak applications. Let canonical package and test all dependencies for their platform, secure and update the apps.

tommica• 4 years ago

Thanks for sharing this comment, its nice to read about the positives of snap, and not just the negative. Helps in getting a better idea of it.

timbit429• 4 years ago

Snaps are available for other distros but I presume Canonical doesn't test their Snaps on all the other distros. Sounds like a recipe for disaster, making Snaps a bad idea.

simonebrunozzi• 4 years ago

Sorry to hear this. If you managed not to get "spoilered" on the result, try to watch it (I'm sure there's several ways to watch a rerun)... it was a phenomenal game.

bobmaxup3• 4 years ago

You can set when snap refreshes take place:

https://snapcraft.io/docs/keeping-snaps-up-to-date#:~:text=o...

CoastalCoder4• 4 years ago

On that page I'm seeing options for delaying snap updates for a limited time, but I'm not seeing anything to prevent them permanently.

jeroenhd2• 4 years ago

"Time duration units can be seconds (s), minutes (m) or hours (h), or a combination of these. A value of forever is also valid, to postpone updates indefinitely:" ... "If no duration is specified, the time duration defaults to forever."

Just running "snap refresh --hold" should disable snap updates permanently. If you configure your system update script/tooling to unhold the snaps so security fixes can still be installed at the appropriate time, this should mean that no unexpected updates should occur.

You could probably even attach the snap unhold + snap refresh + snap hold flow to the APT hooks somehow, integrating snap updates with apt upgrade.

timbit429• 4 years ago

That doesn't fix any of the other problems Snaps cause.

orbit7• 4 years ago

Automated update processes that run at the expense of securing access to information when it's needed or that do so with the risk of data loss are a complete failure in my view.

dm319• 4 years ago

I get why snap is needed, but, like others, my experience has been poor. The first issue was Ubuntu 22.04 shipping the firefox snap only. It's ok for small occasional use programs that you need the bleeding edge version on. But it's not ok to wait 30+ seconds for firefox to open.

They fixed that. But I hit into it's idea of security - being unable to open html files on my local drive, unable to load links from my mutt client, and unable to download and save directly into a specific folder.

And worse, the snap updates just don't function well. They remind you when you are using the program, and they don't seem to update when you're not using it.

Real shame, but these are fixable problems.

cardanome• 4 years ago

Snap is not needed.

On Linux Mint you install Firefox normally through apt and it works fine.

I decide when I update it. As it should be.

(Sure tech like appimage or flatpack has its place but the browser can be handled perfectly fine by the normal package manager of your distribution.)

intelkishan• 4 years ago

I was recently forced into using snap for Firefox by Mint. I had enabled snap for convenient installation of some packages. But I did not anticipate that it would force me to switch to the snap version of Firefox.

alamortsubite• 4 years ago

Real shame, but these are fixable problems.

Debian.

remram2• 4 years ago

Or just the Mozilla PPA.

bradwood• 4 years ago

TIL all about showmax.com - As a ZA expat living in the UK, I'm all over this. Looks like some good content from ZA, Nigeria, et al!

rubyist5eva• 4 years ago

Page isn't working for me but what happened? I use over a bunch snaps on my Ubuntu install (1password, firefox, docker, telegram, discord just off the top of my head) and updates don't happen until I restart the app, and it gives me a desktop notification something like a week out before it forces it, never had an issue with it personally. I can't think of any desktop app that I use that stays open for more than a week at a time that is a huge distruption to close it and reopen it.

chrsw• 4 years ago

I found Snap to be frustating. It's trying to address a real problem but imho it fails to make life easier. As soon as something breaks or goes wrong and I have to look under the hood, my mental model of how traditional Unix software managment "works" is almost useless.

Why can't something be coherent and powerful behind the scenes but slick up front for users who don't want to think too much about the complexities of software managment?

happyjack• 4 years ago

Snap is one of the few reasons that made me ditch Ubuntu forever.

I don't know a ton about Canonical's business model, but was the idea to get everyone hooked on snap and then force a subscription out of it?

Snap is the antithesis of apt or dnf in regards to what I want out of a package manager.

anonymousiam• 4 years ago

Snap has its uses, but Firefox is most certainly not one of them. Firefox maintains personalized databases that aren't where they should be under Snap. Also, Snap completely ruins the ability to run Firefox remotely on a local X display. I was fine with Snap being part of Ubuntu, but when they migrated Firefox to Snap, I uninstalled Snap and manually installed Firefox directly from Mozilla.

tomjuggler2• 4 years ago

Update: so as mentioned in my blog post, my panic force reboot during the Firefox Snap update has definitely done something bad to my system. It's now failing to boot most of the time and also crashing randomly when it does boot. Not sure what the root cause is but it's a 1 year old laptop.

And yes I will definitely be re-watching the game after I have finished installing Arch.

I also signed up to Cloudflare due to you all hammering my server last night!

darthrupert• 4 years ago

You shouldn't be watching that pile of regressive corruption anyway so no harm done.

alanhaha• 4 years ago

Well, I like this line in my Ubuntu customization: sudo apt remove --purge snapd

josephcsible4• 4 years ago

How are you using software that Ubuntu stopped making available any other way, e.g., Firefox?

timbit429• 4 years ago

I'm doing it by using Linux Mint. It's Ubuntu without Snaps. It's taking people a long time to remove from their brains that Ubuntu is a good desktop Linux.

torginus2• 4 years ago

Yet another example of why the traditional champion companies of the Linux desktop (Canonical, Red Hat etc.) are like a poisoned apple - they are catering to their paying userbase (who are running servers, IoT, PoS, whatever), and don't give a damn about making technical changes that break the average users' experience.

In short they are doing the exact same as Microsoft does with Windows, but the enemy this time is inside the gates.

mablopoule• 4 years ago

Honestly, I love snap because it's the main reason why I've switched to Arch after a decade of Ubuntu, and I couldn't be happier about it.

timbit429• 4 years ago

I switched to Linux Mint. It's Ubuntu without Snaps.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos• 4 years ago

Autoupdate is always an abomination regardless of the software doing it. Snap, apt, steam, firefox itself.

major505• 4 years ago

The main reason I still use ubuntu based bistros is Pop OS. The rest, I prefer fedora this days.

throwaway67743• 4 years ago

This is not the fault of snap though, Firefox is just fucking useless - the current instance of the browser that's already loaded everything it has into ram since it will happily suck up a gig while doing nothing should not break because the on disk version has changed.

But no, instead of continuing it will do one of several things:

  - show a blank page after entering URL or search term (no feedback, it just does nothing)
 - fail to refresh the tab
 - crash entirely
 - helpfully suggest you restart Firefox in one of those tabs that stopped working earlier.

It is embarrassingly bad, just like the overall UX for Mozilla products is unfortunately, but alas the only other choice is brave and its even worse somehow. (Chrome proper would also be fine but Firefox is the only multi platform* browser that supports custom sync etc)

* Firefox is horrific on android too - broken rendering, blank pages until you engage the address bar and hit go again, etc, add-ons basically unavailable...

amadeuspagel• 4 years ago

I got strange notifications telling me to close VS Code, so that it can be updated. But it's often closed, and I kept getting these notifications. I ended up uninstalling the snap and installing VS Code from the website.

Ubuntu Snap update spoiled my World Cup Final

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