Quoting: NanobangNONE of the snaps I've installed can even see my data partition exists, let alone access it.

https://snapcraft.io/docs/removable-media-interface [External Link]

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Quoting: PatolaYes. The granularity/heterogenity of PPAs is commonly poised as a disadvantage, but here they are an advantage, because you can disable/enable the sources individually. You have granular control in who you decide to trust.

It's interesting. I asked for some statistics recently from our IS people, and they didn't give me anything other than number of hits over a period of time on a PPA. I can't get any detail about where those people are, who they are, or anything like that, all I know is relatively which are the most popular PPAs and interestingly there are a large number of people who have a PPA - and I'm not going to tell you which one it is - but there is a PPA in Launchpad that is more popular - popular in terms of number of people who hit it every day - and that PPA is empty. It has nothing in it. But it's because people read documents and blog posts and instructions that say, "this is how you get that thing. You add this PPA," and so people just blindly do it, right? And so there are people out there who will blindly follow instructions, even if they are patently wrong they will still do it. And so the Number One most-hit PPA is not providing any value to any user at all, because it doesn't have anything in it. There are no packages in it. It used to but it doesn't any more. It's a problem that people wanted solving and somebody solved it by creating a PPA but subsequently deleted the stuff from that PPA. And none of those users probably even know that that PPA is empty and they probably don't even know that they're no longer getting updates for that piece of software.

(Edit: the transcript is in the "long quote" so I'll repeat the key point: the Number One most-hit PPA is not providing any value to any user at all, because it doesn't have anything in it.)

From the video I linked to earlier. Of course, rather than simply not having anything in, the PPA could put something else there, like the infamous case where someone changed the wallpaper [External Link] of everyone that was hammering their home machine because some instructions somewhere said that people should get software from there.

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Quoting: scaineIt should be, but this is all about money.

It is, but not really for the reasons you're thinking of. A tiny indie developer benefits more than a massive AAA developer does from all the infrastructure that Steam provides. A big multiplat release is going to have their own matchmaking, their own support chain, their own marketing, their own forums, and so on, outside of Steam, so there's less of a value proposition for Valve's cut than is the case for the indie, and supporting a million players in one container is cheaper for Valve than a thousand containers with a thousand players in, so there's scope to lower the rates.

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Quoting: GuestMy main grip with snap was when it installed chromium on my Kubuntu 19.10 it was slower to start. Even with a SSD.

Yep. First run startup of a graphical application is slow. It needs to set up an entire environment of all the things that the application expects to be there to keep it isolated from the actual environment.

The other big one is that, because the application is sandboxed and the default permissions are quite conservative, users don't have access to the files that they expect to from within a snap application.

Also i do not get The point of snaps and flatpacks for open-source software well integrated in the distro. They are maybe less up-to-date but they take less disk space.

For normally-supported stuff, don't use snaps. Just use your normal package manager and get normal package manager updates.

But people want new stuff, even new open source stuff. Containerised applications are much better, and much more discoverable, than plonking on some PPA.

For commercial software that is compiled once and not updated i understand better.

This is the big win. Users can find commercial software in the same place that they find open source software, and it all gets updated the same, without developers having to worry about fragmentation or library incompatibilities, or any of the other things that might scare them away.

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Quoting: Guestyou're allowing a third party to have total access to your system even if you're using them from Mint, Fedora, Manjaro... they're a big security risk.

As opposed to PPAs?

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Quoting: GBeeMaybe I need more coffee, but I've no clue what "Snaps are more locked-down as they compared it to using proprietary software, it pushes Ubuntu directly and Snaps are done in the background." means?

Perhaps I should read the original for elucidation. The above explanation has severely confused me :(

It's Liam's summary of Mint's position, but it's hard to make it clear because Mint's position is just argle bargle.

In Ubuntu chromium is distributed (by default - you can still use a PPA) as a snap, for the reasons Liam linked to. Snaps have a central repository that Canonical pays for and maintains, for the reasons listed in the video I linked to, but other developers can put their stuff on there (other developers putting their stuff on there is kinda the point).

These things have made the Mint people Very Angry.

There are issues with snaps, but they aren't the ones that people get Very Angry about.

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It's worth people watching this video [External Link] - part of a much longer interview [External Link] - so that they're informed about snaps.

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Quoting: KohlyKohlI get the survey on Linux all the time. I'd say once every 3-4 months.

Do you reinstall or distro hop a lot? My understanding is that Steam is only supposed to ask at most once a year.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyEdited to add: On the other hand, the new GoL article about LeNovo adding Ubuntu and RHEL to a bunch of workstations . . . I wonder if that's related?

It certainly seems feasible: if you're going to make your hardware work with Linux anyway for the domestic market, why not try to leverage that work into a wider market? Or they could just be competing with Dell, or it could be an independent move to start offering Linux.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuySecond, I note that in tandem with the rise of Linux share on Steam there is, as usual, a decline in simplified Chinese share. So again, this may not mean much except that the Chinese don't use Linux (more fool they--if there's one bunch that would benefit from ripping out Windows and replacing it with Linux, that would be China).

China's mandating that government computers stop using foreign proprietary software for the same reasons other governments do:

Beijing has ordered all government offices and public institutions to remove foreign computer equipment and software within three years, in a potential blow to the likes of HP, Dell and Microsoft.

Report from the Financial Times. [External Link]

They have their own distros in Kylin and Deepin already. Whether that will translate to more people using Linux in their leisure time it's too early to say (or even if they'll manage to achieve it for government computers) but people wanting to use the same system at home that they were used to at work was a part of Microsoft's desktop dominance back in the day.

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