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Comment by chintan | Hacker News Reader

Hundreds of organizations, including ours, rely on Rocket.Chat for their internal messaging. It all went down when a release was pushed and snap decided to auto-update [1] I can imagine it resulted in a huge loss of productivity at all these orgs in the Covid era.

Just learnt from this thread that apt-install will install snap! I'm running Ubuntu 18.04 + i3 (Dell Developer Edition) but will change to Debian.

[1]. https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/issues/17628

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You can control when to update, https://snapcraft.io/docs/keeping-snaps-up-to-date

But that's just part of the problem though. I want to be able to rely on my system and not have a chance 4 times a day for random things to break (the default frequency based on your link).

The argument about "latest == safest" may have some validity when it comes to browsers, but for everything else a notification that there is a new version would be more than enough.

> the next refresh can be delayed by up to 60 days, after which a refresh will be performed regardless of the refresh.hold value

Taking a leaf right out of Microsoft's book, I see.

Would someone be able to tell me how to plain old turn it off? I still can't tell even after reading the docs

You can turn it off by replacing your operating system with another Linux distribution. As of 20.04 you also still have the option of removing Snap outright[1], as long as you don't need the software that is only provided via snap.

Although apparently they are considering[2] adding the option to disable auto-updates.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22972661 [2] https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/re-visiting-update-control-on-t...

Thanks, I did this on my 20.04 systems and it worked fine. Simply uninstall snapd. I lost LXD (no way I'd use this now anyway if its distributed via snap), and chromium browser (but discovered the far superior Ungoogled version anyway)

apt cannot revert, not even in principle. snap can in principle, and it should just be one command. It looks like it didn't work in this case because of a bug in Rocket.Chat's snap packaging. But bugs happen in everything despite their packaging format, and most users are affected by regressions in apt package updates anyway.

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