Distro News - Ubuntu 20.04 'Focal Fossa', Ubuntu MATE and other flavours released

Still don't see a usecase for snap (or fatpak) on the desktop that would not be better (less time, less space, more reliable functionality) solved by Appimage if you do not get a native package. Trying to push things onto me made me quit the Windows OS and keeps me away from the Gnome DE, just saying Canonical. On the other hand: I like the new icon theme. ;-)

Quoting: Cyba.Cowboy

Quoting: tuubiHey, wait a minute. What do you mean? Sure, they added support for flatpaks in their software center (mintinstall) alongside the normal deb packages, but beyond that I haven't noticed them recommending, much less pushing them. No flatpaks installed by default, no deb packages removed in favour of flatpaks or anything like that. Am I missing something?

They did choose to support flatpak instead of snap, if that's what you mean.

Just "clean" installing all my computers with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS now, so I don't have a screenshot to show you...

But like Ubuntu's "snap" Software Center, Linux Mint's equivalent had both the "regular" package and the "Flatpak" package of many software titles - in most cases, the latter was the current version of <software title> and the "regular" package was an older version (e.g. <software title> as a Debian package would be version 1.x, and the Flatpak package of the same software title would be 2.x).

For various reasons - one of which is that Snaps and Flatpak seem to get updated / upgraded quicker than Debian packages - I prefer to use Snaps and Flatpak... So I replace most of the software on my computer with the Snap / Flatpak version, in addition to installing new software as Snaps / Flatpaks, where ever possible.

I'm sure this was not the case for all Flatpaks under Linux Mint - but I use a fair bit of software, and this was my experience for most of those programs...

Browsing by category in mintinstall seems to list apt packages only, and flatpaks are under their own special category. Searching for packages does list both. All in all, seems like a fairly passive way to "push" flatpaks, and not really comparable to what Canonical/Ubuntu is doing with snaps, IMHO. It's nice that they're there as an option though.

I have read that prime-select doesn't work properly so if you have Nvidia hybrid graphics it would be a good idea to hold off upgrading

I do run standard Ubuntu 18.04 on my laptop (need one machine to have the most common Linux), so I guess I'll upgrade that to 20.04 eventually.

No need to hurry, though, I didn't have any problems with 18.04 to begin with.

I like snaps. They're convenient to install, use and create. There are still a lot of problems with the confinement, performance and ecosystem but these are improving. Canonical know, from their own survey, that about one third of users are positive about snaps, one third neutral and one third negative. If you follow the forums and IRC channels you'll find they are trying hard to improve things.

Thousands of people run the snaps I've packaged, including games like Wolfendoom: Blade of Agony, Quake Shareware and Tales of Maj'Eyal. Some people love them, some people hate them. Some of the hatred comes from my incompetence in packaging and some comes from flaws in snap technology. But we're all learning and trying to improve. This is a community, after all.

Upgrading to 20.04 will break some games (such as those linking to older versions of libssl) and Steam Controller users may be dismayed to find that sc-controller no longer runs. This is because of the deprecation of python2: something Canonical has no control over. I'm working on an sc-controller snap which will allow it to run on 20.04. It requires a bit of new plumbing to come to snapd before it will be ready to use, but the snapd guys are working on this. As I said, this is a community.

Being a community, it would be nice if we could be kind and respectful to each other. Ubuntu (and its flavours and its remixes) offers plenty of scope to run without snaps. It offers plenty of scope to use PPAs, Appimages and Flatpaks. Maybe the whole snap experiment will be abandoned further down the line but that will be dependent on what the community wants. Canonical are asking them and are being transparent about the results. Is that worth the anger? Let's enjoy what has been created, uninstall whatever annoys us and thank our respective $DEITYs that we have the freedom to do so.

Quoting: tuubiBrowsing by category in mintinstall seems to list apt packages only, and flatpaks are under their own special category. Searching for packages does list both. All in all, seems like a fairly passive way to "push" flatpaks, and not really comparable to what Canonical/Ubuntu is doing with snaps, IMHO. It's nice that they're there as an option though.

That's more or less how Ubuntu does it... The only real difference is that the Ubuntu Development Team have chosen to replace certain software with the "Snap" version rather than the "Debian" version (where as with Linux Mint, you actually need to choose to replace some of the default programs with the "Flatpak" version).

But even then, I'd hardly call that "Canonical forcing Snap down your throat"...


Last edited by Cyba.Cowboy on 24 April 2020 at 2:14 pm UTC

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: eldakingI'll wait a bit anyway and probably will update to 20.04 if it isn't too obnoxious to avoid snaps for most things, or if at least it works well.

sudo apt purge snapd will get rid of snaps entirely. Easy enough.

Yes, but my understanding is that will also get rid of your ability to easily install certain software packages. In my case, I use spek to analyze audio files, but it can only be installed through snap now.

Although now that I've actually tested it, it seems that spek is extremely slow to start and doesn't even work (it says "The file contains no audio streams" when I know that's false). So hooray for snap? :p


Last edited by Mountain Man on 24 April 2020 at 4:07 pm UTC

Quoting: SchattenspiegelStill don't see a usecase for snap (or fatpak) on the desktop that would not be better (less time, less space, more reliable functionality) solved by Appimage if you do not get a native package. Trying to push things onto me made me quit the Windows OS and keeps me away from the Gnome DE, just saying Canonical. On the other hand: I like the new icon theme. ;-)

Yeah, I use the Cura Appimage for 3D Printing, it works fine. I'd prefer one updated through apt myself, as that would put it in my Gnome Launcher, instead of me having to dig into Nautilus to click on an Icon, though I used to do that on the Atari ST back in the day, so not sure how that's any different :P

Quoting: SchattenspiegelStill don't see a usecase for snap (or fatpak) on the desktop that would not be better (less time, less space, more reliable functionality) solved by Appimage if you do not get a native package.

Amen! I've been distributing Linux binaries in AppImage format for quite a while, and I really like how they're small and self-contained, with no daemon required in the background for them to run.

I had looked at both snap and flatpak as alternatives, but the whole idea of distributing binaries in the first place was for stuff to just work across distributions with minimal dependencies.

In general though, I'll want to use the regular binaries, managed via the package repository. With the image based applications, if some library they include has vulnerabilities, all the applications need to be patched and updated individually. With regular programs, the library in question can be updated and all the dependent applications are golden.

Quoting: toivopI have read that prime-select doesn't work properly so if you have Nvidia hybrid graphics it would be a good idea to hold off upgrading

Do you have any links to bug reports or forum posts regarding that?
prime-select via command line or via the mate-optimus seems to work without problems for me.

It could be some problems for only certain hardware, or the users had something broken before or its widespread problem, a link to a report would be nice.


Last edited by Redface on 24 April 2020 at 6:08 pm UTC