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Comment by ndsipa_pomu | Hacker News Reader

They could do with improving the behaviour of snaps first before removing alternatives. The updates are currently awkward as they don't seem to work if the application is running which can be a problem with something like Firefox which I have running for days at a time. It's also annoying that it's gone from using simple "apt" commands to keep the machine up-to-date, to also needing a "snap refresh".

I choose to use Ubuntu at work for a bunch of stuff, but snaps are making me consider whether it's worth migrating over to Debian instead.

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I gave up on snap for Firefox, still use snap for other stuff on server. The issue I had with snap version of Firefox is that it Downloads feature is crippled.

As an example I wanted to download some pictures from a webpage , for each picture I was forced to select the destination folder because each time it defaulted to some snap related folder(I forgot).

The browser feature where it remember that downloads from site A goes in folder Fa and downloads from be go to Fb is a big time saver. I got the Firefox tar.gz file and using that/

I did. It's been a few months, and I am not going back to Ubuntu. I find Debian no different from Ubuntu. (I do not use GNOME, but rather stick with XFCE).

> The updates are currently awkward as they don't seem to work if the application is running

The fix for this is currently being tested: https://bugs.launchpad.net/snapd/+bug/1980271

> before removing alternatives

Alternatives remain available for install. They weren't removed.

apt install firefox still works?

I think it does, why wouldn't it work? That's installing it via aptitude, not flatpak.

It does not work as one would expect. Instead of installing Firefox itself, it installs some sort of a script that installs Firefox from snap.

It hasn't 'worked' since Ubuntu 21.10. Ubuntu overrides your apt install and installs the snap version instead for programs that have snaps.

I think you now need to add a PPA in order to get new versions or ESR of FF on Ubuntu.

That issue is related, but not quite what I meant. I would want the app to be updated in the background whilst it is running (which works fine for APT installed packages), so just closing it and re-opening it would get the newer version. That bug you linked to is the issue that after getting a visual prompt about a newer version of Firefox being available, the "snap refresh" isn't run immediately after closing it down. Having to close an app to update it reminds me of the pain of Windows updates.

You're technically correct (the best kind) about them not removing alternatives, but you have to do some manual intervention to get them back, so I consider it being removed when compared to the previous behaviour of having them available by default.

> I would want the app to be updated in the background whilst it is running (which works fine for APT installed packages), so just closing it and re-opening it would get the newer version.

The Firefox deb (such as in 20.04) became unusable and tabs crashed when the deb was updated without a restart.

It's really down to each individual app as to whether it will work being updated in the background or not.

AIUI the new snap implementation gets everything ready in the background, so the update on closing it and re-opening it is quick.

> The Firefox deb (such as in 20.04) became unusable and tabs crashed when the deb was updated without a restart.

I never encountered that for any previous version of Ubuntu.

> AIUI the new snap implementation gets everything ready in the background, so the update on closing it and re-opening it is quick.

I hope they get it working soon as my experience is that "snap refresh" does nothing whilst Firefox is running and doesn't even notify you that there's updates available.

It's insane how long it takes them to fix bugs in their auto-update mechanism they've forced on everyone. Things like that were reported years and years ago. They fixed the data corruption issue with their auto-update mechanism, but that too existed for years.

They also still haven't fixed that disgusting ~/snap folder.

It's very obvious by now how little Canonical cares about their users.

> It's insane how long it takes them to fix bugs in their auto-update mechanism they've forced on everyone.

You can disable auto-updates with eg. "snap refresh --hold firefox". See: https://snapcraft.io/docs/keeping-snaps-up-to-date#heading--...

Though not taking security updates for Firefox seems like a very dangerous thing to do.

That command works on snapd 2.58+, even Ubuntu 22.10 still ships 2.57.5 unless you've gotten extra channels enabled.

It's a very new addition after people being pissed for years. I suspect most people would be fine without hold if the auto-update would be seamless. Years ago it literally unmounted applications' storage abruptly, sessions and databases still open... Not well thought-out.

snapd 2.58 is available as an update recommended by default on Ubuntu going all the way back to 18.04. A standard "apt update && apt upgrade" will give you it. Unless you've gone out of your way to turn updates off.

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