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Ubuntu Linux

Ubuntu Core as an immutable Linux Desktop base (ubuntu.com) 71

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
motang writes: Canonical, the sponsor of widely popular Ubuntu Linux, plans on shipping the next LTS in two versions. In addition to the traditional version, there will be one immutable desktop OS flavor. From Canonical blog: The technology behind snaps extends beyond the distribution of desktop applications however. With Ubuntu Core this philosophy of security and stability applies equally to the components that make up the entire Ubuntu operating system. Rather than treating the OS as a single immutable 'blob,' Ubuntu Core breaks it up into discrete components. The base of Ubuntu Core, for example, is built on four primary snaps:

Gadget: Defines the system's bootloader, partition layout and default configurations for snaps.
Kernel: Containing the Linux kernel and hardware drivers.
Base: A minimal Ubuntu OS image containing only the necessary services and utilities to support the applications running on top.
Snapd: Manages the lifecycle of all snaps in an Ubuntu Core system.
Additional OS snaps can then be layered onto this image to enable other elements of the operating system such as a desktop environment.
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Ubuntu Core as an immutable Linux Desktop base More

Ubuntu Core as an immutable Linux Desktop base

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  • Fuck snaps (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 31, 2023 @04:43PM (#63565507)

    That is all

    • I support this message. Flatpak or bust.

      • Agreed.

        I'm curious why they didn't go for Flatpak.

        That aside, I'd probably go for an immutable Mint system (yes, I know Mint is Ubuntu underneath) but from what I read, "there will be one immutable desktop OS flavor", and I'm guessing switching it to Cinnamon probably isn't easily done, if at all.

        Or would that be possible? I don't know squat about the innards of doing this, maybe someone here who knows more about this than I do* could weigh in?

        ----
        * which is practically anyone with a pulse TBH

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dargaud ( 518470 )
        What's the difference. I'm fed up of all those new packaging systems. And does that mean Ubuntu will be 10 times larger on disk since every snap has a duplicate of all necessary libs ?
      • Flatpak have their own set of problems.

    • Re:Fuck snaps (Score:5, Funny)

      by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Wednesday May 31, 2023 @04:56PM (#63565571)

      A circle of IT professionals, all dressed in robes of black, circle around the server rack in the darkened basement allotted their kind. Deep in the night, they allow the hobbyist faction, with robes of gray, to enter their sacred, unholy chamber. The black robes raise their hands for silence, then, one of them speaks:

      FUCK SNAPS!

      The hobbyists look around, confused for a moment. The other IT professionals nod their heads, then bow, raising their hoods. A low, barely audible chant begins. It slowly increases in volume and intensity. The hobbyists slowly join in.

      fuck snaps.
      fuck snaps.
      FUCK SNAPS.
      FUCK SNAPS!
      FUCK SNAPS!

      At the height of their chant, the magic spell breaks over the server rack, the CPUs in the rack suddenly running smoother, faster, with less waste heat. The spell spills out onto the network, and out to the internet.

      The leader of the black robes looks up. "It has been done. May the great gods of the holy cypher forever honor the pact. Go forth, spread the word, the snaps will be tolerated no longer."

      The hobbyists and IT professionals bow their heads more deeply, and whisper together, "Amen."

    • Re:Fuck snaps (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ppanon ( 16583 ) on Wednesday May 31, 2023 @05:03PM (#63565599) Homepage Journal

      Yeah, in 22.04 LTS I regularly have the Firefox and Chromium snaps get messed up and prevent the applications from starting up. The only way to fix it is to remove the snap, reboot, and reinstall the snap. That was already the case in 20.04. It's currently the biggest pain point for me in Ubuntu. Switching the whole O/S to run on snaps is the last thing I would trust/want to do. Even if they've they've fixed that problem in 22.10 or 23.04, I won't trust it until at least one 2-year cycle on 24.04 where I've not snap had problems with either Firefox or Chromium.

      Or I may jump to Mint since they've apparently added support for version upgrades since I last looked into it.

      • I have run into a collision between application design practices and snaps. Two applications that I installed with snap at first proved unusable since they both wrote their preference or other operating config information of a path that was immutable within the snap. An app that I cannot change any settings on is an unusable one.

      • I do something similar ... (Score:5, Informative)

        by kbahey ( 102895 ) on Wednesday May 31, 2023 @06:18PM (#63565799) Homepage

        I do the same thing, but with an extra step, as I outlined here [slashdot.org].

        Basically, remove the Firefox and Chrome snaps, then remove snapd itself.

        Then install Firefox and Chromium from APT PPA repositories.

        I am still on 20.04 LTS, and I am hoping that the same plan works on 22.04 LTS as well.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • In Ubuntu 22.04, it automatically removes third party repo versions of Firefox, and installs the Canonical version that tries to install the snap version instead.

            That doesn't sound right, are you suggesting there is special code to give the Canonical version higher priority than a user can give? Either way, I use the PPA Firefox on 22.04 and still have snapd running, but it has no snaps besides the admin ones.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
              Ok I'm no expert, but beyond using a bit more storage, what is with the wide spread aversion to snap? is this just another case of "you have to auto hate everything coming from canonical" or are there other things at work here?

              • The hatred could be overblown, but this is my list and understanding;

                • * Bad desktop integration. I couldn't save files from Firefox to my home area because snap ran as some virtual user. They had to be saved to /tmp and manually moved. This particular problem is probably fixed now, but I've heard claims that the isolation inherently stops it adhering to general desktop standards.
                • * Forced/nagging updates. Probably something that can be turned off but in particular on my media/projector machine it would freque

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
                  Thanks for taking the time to give this ecilent answer. Yea the lack of desktop integration does indeed seam like a rather large issue.
              • Comment removed based on user account deletion
            • Comment removed based on user account deletion

              • I'm not denying your experience, and my package management understanding is surface level, but that hasn't happened for me. According to my notes I set the mozillateam PPA to priority 501 and the Ubuntu one to -1 (disabled). Ten months later, Synaptic reports two available versions, 1:1snap1-0ubuntu2 and 114.0+build2-0ubuntu0.22.041~mt1, and shows the installed version to be the latter. A cat /proc/<firefox pid>/cmdline shows /usr/lib/firefox/firefox, and snap list has bare, core, snap-store etc., not

              • You did something wrong. I followed these instructions;

                https://askubuntu.com/question... [askubuntu.com]

                I've been running non-snap Firefox now since I installed 22.04 back in... umm... September I think? Can't recall exactly offhand.

      • FFS, uninstall the snap. Uninstall snap. Install Firefox from a ppa

        https://askubuntu.com/question... [askubuntu.com]

      • One of the annoying thing about snaps is they rely on how you login to the system. For instance things run from systemd or cron don't have the correct cgroup (or whatever) stuff setup so it breaks.

        Whenever a paradigm change is made, people ought to make clear how it works so that you can work around the stuff it breaks.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Pascoea ( 968200 )
      Nerds: "They need to make Linux easier to use so that the masses can adopt it."
      Canonical: "Here's Ubuntu, we've made it easy as possible. You can install safe modular components to meet most all of your needs. Anybody can do it."
      Nerds: "You're breaking Linux by obfuscating all the complicated parts that I like to pretend to know what they do!"
      • I am a nerd, and still hope that Linux in the desktop will remain where it is: all the applications that I need or want are available to me, and the bad guys will carry on focusing on Windows. Kudos to the Ubuntu and Gnome people (the latter, in particular) whose efforts are contributing significantly to that cause.

      • you left out the part where it turns ubuntu into a platform of resource hog snaps because each tries to get as much as it can for itself instead of letting the OS provide the resources intelligently. And where nothing runs predictably because there isn't any cohesion on the platform.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Pascoea ( 968200 )
          I was just being snarky. I honestly don't know shit about snaps, beyond the 5 minutes I spent reading about them before I commented. I would agree, that sounds like a pretty crap way to allocate resources.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Your title is literally what I came here to say.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Barnoid ( 263111 )

      As an over two-decade long Gentoo user, still happily compiling away, I detest the bloatedness of modern package systems. I remember installing a Flatpack for meld on a friend's Ubuntu machine a couple of years back and was appalled by the 1.7GB download.

      Here's how meld looks like on a Gentoo system:

      $ ls -lh /usr/bin/meld -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 16K May 3 22:55 /usr/bin/meld

      Sure, no libraries included, but that was the entire point of libraries - common use. Young programmers...sigh.

  • How backdoored is it?

  • Sounds terrible (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Wednesday May 31, 2023 @04:59PM (#63565581)

    If all of that sounds terrible and you want a distro that does things the "old fashioned" way then check out Slackware. Yes it's still around and still headed by Patrick Volkerding. http://www.slackware.com/ [slackware.com]

    • What it sounds like is something that isn't at all for the same purpose as Slackware. This is not for your desktop or crappy server box sitting in a rack somewhere. And there's a reason Slackware is none existent on the cloud.

      Leave the one solution fits all to the windows weirdos will you.

      • Bah jetlagged. Remove the word desktop from my post, that's exactly what it's for and slackware makes an utterly crap desktop OS.

      • And there's a reason Slackware is none existent on the cloud.

        I see that as a bonus.

        • I see that as irrelevant. You should be picking the right tool for the job and not criticising tools not for your job because they aren't the tool for your job.

          I drive a small hatchback because I need a small car that fits in small parking spaces, not because it's a car I've not seen on a racetrack.

    • Re:Sounds terrible (Score:4, Informative)

      by TheRealMindChild ( 743925 ) on Wednesday May 31, 2023 @05:36PM (#63565689) Homepage Journal

      Slackware is almost the farthest thing you can get from Ubuntu. People who use Ubuntu want it to "just work", not having to hunt for premade packages or compile apps from source

      • This. I run Xubuntu as my primary desktop and am very happy. It works almost perfectly and when something comes up, I can usually fix it with some command line work-arounds.

        25 years ago when I first started messing with Linux, I tried Redhat, Mandrake, and Slackware. I ended up sticking with Slackware as my go-to for Linux but back then Windows for gaming was king.

        Slackware was super stable and you had to do everything by hand. Editing config files and really learning the OS just to get it setup exactly how

        • What's wrong with pure Debian? After investigating Ubuntu I thought it unneccesarily complicated for my needs.

          Basic Debian is easy enough to install and gives you most of the same choices you'd get from Ubuntu or a derivative, including desktop varieties. I'm running LXDE since that most resembles Gnome 2 and uses very few resources.

      • >"Slackware is almost the farthest thing you can get from Ubuntu. People who use Ubuntu want it to "just work", not having to hunt for premade packages or compile apps from source"

        Then install Linux Mint. Problem solved.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by TheBAFH ( 68624 )

        It seems that you haven't used Slackware for a long time. It's much easier to install and maintain now, with slackpkg+ with the extra binary packages repositories, sbopkg for compiling applications (and their dependencies) from source or creating Slackware packages from pre-existing binaries for other distros and a very vivid support community in linuxquestions.org.

        I'm using Slackware since the "hard" days, since 1997. It still just works as always and it is so much easier now that I got bored. So, I decid

      • I had problems specifically with snap not working properly and leaving my browser in an unusable state, and also it was irritating when it was working because the integration was poor. Maybe (I'd hope) they've fixed these particular problems by now, but I'm not yet convinced that snap is a good answer to any of my questions regardless.

        On the other hand, if it somehow makes an immutable core Linux system more viable and/or secure, then maybe it has a reason to exist after all. But I'd have to be convinced of

    • I use Slackware regularly. Hell I literally have it in my username. I would NOT recommend Slackware to the same demographic that enjoys Ubuntu.

      that does things the "old fashioned" way

      Okay not to split hairs, but Slackware init is kind of it's own thing. It's very SysV like (the kind of runlevels and rc.d), very BSD like (file layout /bin and /sbin, sh per runlevel), but it's neither of those completely and has some things completely its own (rc.font for example). I get what you're trying to say here. But Slackware init is Slackware init and

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • It's not the idea, so much as it's the typical implementation. Unlike something like MacOS or Windows, where foundational libraries are going to be common, you end up with each app having a huge number of different libraries, or even a variation of the same libraries.

    Result: you end up with a huge number of (potentially conflicting) duplicate libraries all over the place. You might as well run a java desktop for all the memory overhead and inefficiency that introduces.

    Sorta glad I use a Mac now almost exclu

    • Re:It's not the idea, it's the implementation. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by codebase7 ( 9682010 ) on Wednesday May 31, 2023 @06:01PM (#63565749)

      Unlike something like MacOS or Windows, where foundational libraries are going to be common, you end up with each app having a huge number of different libraries, or even a variation of the same libraries.

      You can blame the upstream library developers for that. Many of them will happily yank APIs out of their libraries without any form of backwards compatibility in mind. Screaming "deprecation" the entire time. Then to ensure backwards compatibility for prebuilt binary packages, distro maintainers have to reintroduce the old APIs in a distro specific build. From then on, newer packages wind up being built to use the distro version instead of the upstream version. Cue the library developers whining and crying about needing to support multiple versions of their code. Finally, the library developers start writing their own package managers because they don't want to support the distro's native package manager and you get results like SNAP / Flatpak / Docker / etc.

      For all that Microsoft gets wrong, legacy API and ABI support isn't one of them. Sure there's corner cases, but it's a far cry from Linux where even having the source code doesn't guarantee that you be able to get a working program out of it without significant effort. (In addition to breaking ABI compatibility, those API changes require source code updates in the software that depends on them. Or the software will fail to compile.)

      • Many of them will happily yank APIs out of their libraries without any form of backwards compatibility in mind. Screaming "deprecation" the entire time.

        Which is more of a BSD than Linux thing to do. (said as a fan of both)

      • Microsoft can support legacy stuff because they have basically one distro, Windows. I'm not sure why when shit like this happens that Linux junkies don't figure out their need to take their ball and go home, and then create their own new distro causes most of Linux's woes. You want to fork as much as you like, then expect chaos. Extreme flexibility means extreme complexity. If devs didn't have to think about all the fucking distros, there wouldn't be a need for shitty snaps and shitty flatpacks.

  • Fedora (Score:4, Informative)

    by John Allsup ( 987 ) <<ten.euqsilahc> <ta> <todhsals>> on Wednesday May 31, 2023 @05:33PM (#63565679) Homepage Journal

    I've only recently given Fedora another go, as Ubuntu was my daily driver before. Xfce for ages, though I love how KDE is now, so use Kubuntu and the KDE spin of Fedora. Like KDE, for ages I never got on with Fedora. But I'm starting to like it. As for snaps, the less said the better. I remove all the snaps I can. And disable unattended upgrades, while I'm at it. While I can applaud what snaps are _trying_ to do, I can't get on with how they're actually going about it.

  • Snap, like AppArmor or Wayland, are good ideas but yet immature implementations. I had to remove them from Ubuntu to get rid of bugs.

  • Ubuntu,

    You've made so many stupid self-serving projects that all get abandoned. Snaps are yet another undead project that nobody wants. If we want something like snaps, we're gonna use Flatpak. Please stop trying to force your crap on everyone.

    Regards,

    A former Ubuntu user who's sick of your crap

  • Has there been an influx of old Microsoft employees at Canonical? Where do you even get such stupid ideas? Starting with snap as a solution to nonexisting problem, ending with illogical naming and grouping of concepts. Put partitioning and snaps under same group and call it gadget? Is that a Chatgpt version 0.001 trying it's best? Or you have found some funny mushrooms? Bootloader as a low level software does not need anything snap tries to solve. Nobody needs snap at all. Neither do we need flatpaks. Packa
  • Ubuntu, the once, great distro should should just die a graceful death.
  • Ever since Ubuntu committed suicide with Unity, Ubuntu has made the most stupid initiatives. Ubuntu has been destroyed from the inside.

  • The product I work on is based on some insanely expensive COTS that is officially supported only on RHEL and Ubuntu, and an internal third-party product that runs on Ubuntu and nothing else. Also, our product is intended to run in air-gapped network environments. We're on 20.04 which we were able to club into submission, but watch what happens in 22.04 when you can't get rid of snaps completely and the system gets cranky when it can't phone home for updates you don't have the option of disabling.

  • I keep reading about these horror stories around the mandatory use of systemd, snaps, flatpaks, wayland (IMO promising but not yet ready for all use cases), and the general practice of distributions trying to force users into choices that may not make sense for them individually.

    Obviously some are better than others, and YMMV, but for my needs, Gentoo has suited me perfectly.

    It's less of a distribution, and more of a meta-distribution, a set of very useful tools by which one can craft his or her distributio

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