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by ressetera 2242 days ago
Snaps are great for auto updating software, especially the ones from JetBrains.

I think most users will be fine. Those of us who need more fine grained control, can have it.

4 comments

Chromium silently moved to a snap package some weeks ago.

Annoying but harmless: it's start time has multiplied.

Workflow-breaking: Chromium now can't see my NFS mounts anymore.

It's not just about having a pretty home directory.

Workflow-breaking: KDE integration, Estonian eID signing and GooPG plugins don't work, also data loss when Chromium updates and you have it open
You'd be surprised. Whenever my helm snap updates it breaks all the authentication I previously set up. And I get a weird error. That's not me needing fine grained control. It's just snaps being awful.
You can have pretty much the same with the tar.gz package, just unpack at a location, execute the setup to create the desktop file and some symlinks and you're set, plus you're notified upon a new update, no need to use Snap for that.
JetBrains has their own tool called 'Toolbox' to install and update their software (and Android Studio). With Toolbox you are in control when and what to update and you can install multiple versions at the same time.

It's distributed as AppImage for Linux. Very much recommended.