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Comment by conradk | Hacker News Reader

I tried using Ubuntu 18.04 recently. While snap seem like a good idea, the main issue I have is that there seems to be no way to know who publishes snaps. A list of approved vendors would be useful.

Sure, there are some 'Verified Accounts', and Opera has one. But the main app for Slack, Spotify, Telegram Desktop or BitWarden come from unverified accounts. And some of these are not sandboxed, like the Slack app. Having BitWarden, a password manager, use an unverified account seems totally crazy.

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I like snaps but I ve stopped using them because they auto update Windows10 style. In the snap forums a lot of people asked for the ability to disable updates in order to update only when you want. Integration with the software and updates app in Ubuntu would go a long way here. But no snap devs have refused that (unless you are an enterprise customer and use a proprietary extension). So if you have snaps their update process is totally separate from other apps in your Ubuntu desktop and outside of your control barring some time settings for soft auto update exceptions hidden in the CLI interface.

I think this is largely because for developers, the auto-updating is one of the biggest selling points of the snap distribution method.

The developers don't want to maintain old clients...backward compatibility proved too expensive. Apple proved autoupdate is the way. Browser vendors did the same.

I don't think people expect old clients to be maintained, but I generally don't like auto-updating. I don't want my computer to use CPU, disk I/O, or network bandwidth for updates except when it's convenient for me. Also, in some cases it can be worth it to stick with an older version if a newer version introduces a bug or something.

Me too. I'm going to avoid snaps now that I know this.

But at the very least, Apple lets users disable automatic update (and always have, always will). The default is automatic updates, but it's far from forced.

My OSX auto uptate is disabled. I'm still using Yosemite. It asks nicely occasionally if/when I want to upgrade. It does not install updates in an annoying way lke Windows does.

I dont't like them because they add a mount for each snap and it fills my mount table with unecessary cruft.

In fact Ubuntu 18 became so annoying that I started installing Debian instead.

I use appimages. You just drop them wherever you want and they just work like Go binaries. No snapd, mounts and overengineered infrastructure.

We only recently added the "verified accounts" feature. Many of the apps you listed are actually from verified accounts but we're in the process of validating them. We should have all the major ones done soon.

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