[41b696ef1113]

The forced Snap-ification of Firefox pushed me from Ubuntu into another distro (Pop OS). A decade ago, Ubuntu offered real usability improvements (working Wifi, what?!) compared to the competition. Now, the various Linux flavors all work approximately the same. If Ubuntu is looking for positive differentiation, Snap is not it.

[ainar-g]

It wouldn't be as infuriating if Snap weren't such an awful product, both for the user and for the developer. Just off the top of my head:

1. Sometimes it will warn you when uninstalling a snap will break other snaps; most of the time it doesn't. I removed some snap recently, and Firefox stopped launching.

2. The snapcraft CLI is awful. No way to disable colours, no man pages, no proper error codes, etc.

3. Every time you need some non-trivial piece of functionality, you have to go to ask Canonical for permission. The permission is, most of the time, granted relatively easily, but still.

4. The plug (permission, basically) system is confusing. The documentation is sparse and often doesn't actually answer, which plug you need. And you pretty much have to install snappy-debug (using snap, of course!) to find out approximately, which plug you'd need to add. Thru Canonical, of course. See 3.

5. No way to have your own instance of snap store. If you want to find out, why the upload fails or if the plug will work properly, you have to actually upload a snap to the actual Snap™ Store®.

6. Firefox cannot access /tmp/. A truly baffling thing.

The day Mark&co. finally realize that this thing won't work, no matter how many things they force into snap, is the day I will start a three-day party, heh.

[weare138]

Good list. I would add requiring snapd, which runs as root, to do anything with snap packages. You need to open up an entirely new potential attack surface just to use snaps.

[t6jvcereio]

> The snapcraft CLI is awful.

More importantly I would ask: why do I have to learn a new cli? For the convenience of canonical?

[enriquto]

Notice that you can still use ubuntu with plain firefox and no snap at all on your system. First thing I do on a new ubuntu install is to remove snap and other clutter. It's still a plain debian totally under your control, after all.

[bkallus]

Why not just use plain Debian, then?

[enriquto]

For a new install, sure. But so often in my lab we get computers with "ubuntu preinstalled" and stuff.