Hello: Is there any reason not to go minimum install and use snaps wherever you can? Other than availability of snaps, I’m not seeing a downside to this approach.
Just fishing for opinions. Thanks…
That’s pretty much my plan.
Yeah, just needed a quick reality check. A no brainer really.
Sometimes simple is just that.
Was curious if I was somehow not considering something.
So far my snap experience has been positive and, in conjunction with UM, perfect for my needs.
I haven’t used snaps before. What are the advantages of using them over flatpak, and over regular software?
Of course all I’ve heard are rants about their size and no control over updates so I don’t have a full picture. For it to be such a no brainer, I’d like to know your reasoning, if that’s ok.
Not claiming to be an expert by any measure, but my understanding is the dependencies are package in the snap so when it is updated, it all works. For me it is frustrating when an app updates and the libraries don’t (or visa versa) and something breaks. Not the end of the world, but an inconvenience to sort out. Just seems more stable.
Anybody, feel free to correct me. That’s why I floated the question out there. Just seems too good to be true. Hope that answers where I’m coming from and what my perspective is.
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Snaps are similar to Flatpak in terms of how they differ from traditional packages. They’re sandboxed (with some the of usual caveats about security on X11) and can be installed on different underlying OSes and easily removed knowing that the base system will be exactly the same.
What makes them more interesting to me is that it seems that they are being designed to build the whole system, not just a way to install applications. There are command-line tools, server software, libraries and programming languages being packaged as Snaps. I’ve heard Flathub would accept something like youtube-dl if you packaged it with a .desktop file and so on, but that’s still more like an “app”, just a command-line one.
Snaps are still being developed, and some things like theme support aren’t fully there yet. But I too have had an almost completely positive experience so far.
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I love the idea. I was going to do a minimal install with UM when 18.04 comes out and start fresh with snaps, filling in where I need to with apt- apps.
Thanks for the hand @elcste .
I have VLC 3.0 as a snap and Gradio as a flatpak and neither have given me troubles yet.
I think the first snap I installed was Nextcloud server on a RPI2 & that one has been in service for what must be a year by now with no issues. Just seems like the most trouble free way to go right now.
Me too. Anxiously waiting new UM and very optimistic.
It’s true that their size is because they bundle all their dependencies too, I believe they also use delta updating so updates only parts of what has changed is downloaded (whereas regular Debian packaged software would download the package in full each time)
They do automatically update in the background as far as I’m aware, which can be a good thing for users who just want to run the latest stable versions of their software without fuss – e.g. the web browser with all latest security updates. It’s possible the snap version may be newer then the version stuck in the Ubuntu repositories for a release cycle.
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True in vlc’s case and it is nice to be able to have more than one version installed without having something go sideways.
Thanks All: Have Beta in vm and putting minimal install to test right now with snaps. So far so good.
Maybe this isn’t the place to mention this, but my issue with snaps is the ‘snap’ directory in $HOME. It seems to me it should be a hidden directory, isn’t it more “system” type files than “user” files? If I backup my $HOME, I don’t want to backup ‘snap’ directory because I’ll re-install snaps anyway.
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