I'm using Kubuntu 23.04, do not use Snaps, and wish to update to Thunderbird 115 from the installed version 102. Is this possible? It appears as if Ubuntu have stopped providing non-Snap packages for mainstream apps and Thunderbird themselves offer me a tar.bz2 whilst I'd rather use packaged apps. Will Thunderbird 115 be available as an official .deb file at all; will it be in the repos? What's the best non-Snap way to install it and keep it updated?

I have yet to see a Snapd or Flatpak build of Audacity that I'm happy with. Those builds are beyond our control as they are made by 3rd parties. I do find it mildly annoying that Flatpak direct users that have problems with their builds to us.

Today, on my machine, the KCalc Snap takes a full seven seconds to start up. Not just the first time after boot; every time, without fail. Seven seconds to start a calculator.

Snap is the slowest of all, largely because it stores all its data in squashfs images. Snap mounts all registered snaps at startup instead of just extracting the metadata they need beforehand, possibly in an effort to mitigate this slowness. They’re just moving part of the slow startup time to the boot time of your computer. All sorts of snap crap now shows up in mount and fdisk -l. The more snaps you have installed, the slower your computer will start, even if you don’t use them.

the snap-based chromium cannot access files on my separately-mounted /opt filesystem. The non-snap chromium has no such limitation. Until or unless the snap version ever is able to access all the filesystems on my device, I am willing to live with the risk of a PPA-based version.

I might just leave it installed, in case Canonical ends up replacing more important deb packages with snaps. (I might also drop Ubuntu if they do that.) As long as there isn't a snap directory cluttering my home dir, I can tolerate snapd lurking in the background for now.

I'll use any of them, so long as it's not somebody's proprietary BS.But even if Canonical gave up on keeping all of Snap distribution private in-house, it would still be my last choice because of all the issues Snaps have (and other options don't).

They wanna be to Linux what the Play Store is to Android, what the App Store is to iOS.But we don't do that around here. We use Flatpak round 'ere.

And this is why I left Ubuntu. If I want a SNAP I will install a SNAP. Otherwise stay out of my crap.

Here is a link to install a deb version of chromium, seems like it be easier to use another browser myself.

Not sure but might be a chromium snap problem. Snaps have very few permissions, can try going to software centre/store and see if you can give more permissions, should just be on/off switch, or might need to use another browser(deb not snap). Chromium might have a deb only version now again, but not sure if for 19.10 or only 20.04.

When Snap was introduced Canonical promised it would never replace APT. This promise was broken. Some APT packages in the Ubuntu repositories not only install snap as a dependency but also run snap commands as root without your knowledge or consent and connect your computer to the remote proprietary store operated by Canonical.

the bloody mount points. I couldn't believe that when I realised what was going on. I got the wire brush and dettol out and scraped it off my drive. Never, ever again.

It won't work if $HOME is not under /home. Really. Not even if you softlink. You need a bind mount

There's a lot of advice online showing how to get rid of snap. (e.g.: https://cialu.net/how-to-disable-and-remove-completely-snaps-in-ubuntu-linux/ worked for me) so the only result (so far, a few months later) is that Chromium has lost a user, and having upgraded Ubuntu since the original Warty, if snap becomes obligatory I'll have to take a look at Mint, or Devuan.

I managed to remove it myself this morning...apparently it used to get it's hooks in so deep it was very difficult to remove the daemon as it interconnected with ubuntu-desktop for....reasons.

Good. Hate snap. It's insidious and a pain to deal with.

Plus, have you seen how many loopback mounting points it creates? "df" becomes very hard to use as it buries your actual drives with it's own. One for the daemon, one for GTK, one for Gnome, one for each of the snaps you have installed....

it's an absolute resource hog

Besides running contrary to the principles that lead a lot of people to Linux systems (a closed store that you can't alter...automatic updates you have no control over....run by just the one company)

The strangest "quirk" I had was that I couldn't get the web browser to save a file directly to an attached, encrypted drive. Permissions problem. So I had to save to an interim folder then move it across by hand. Utter pain.

I found that snap can cause lots of issues. I installed keepass using snap, and it installed as a sandboxed app. Very nice for security you would think. Well, a short while later, after 3 upgrades to keepass, it deleted the oldest snap container, which just happened to contain my password file. So secure that even you can't use your passwords now!

If upstream code presumes things will work that dont in snap (e.g. accesses /tmp or /etc) the snap maintainer has to rewrite that code and maintain a fork. Pointless work. Packaging for .deb is a no-brainer.

It's Snap that drove me to Arch, so it did me a huge favour. Seeing things like GNOME as a snap and other 'core' products wasn't something I was comfortable with. Personally, I prefer flatpaks as a packaging format when compared to snap and appimage. I agree that Linux needs an app delivery format, but snap's current implementation isn't it.

The cost of snap is too high. Its Linux ffs. We want it lean, mean, open, stable, file based, and bash friendly. We want our tools to work together, and above all, we want choice. Snap is none of that.

Its not too complicated but it is an annoyance. I want /etc/hosts, /etc/resolv.conf, /etc/nsswitch.conf, /etc/rc.local and all the standard stuff to work. The heavy lifting is done in the kernel. All they need to do is leave it alone. Its getting harder to make Ubuntu behave like Linux.

Did my first Xubuntu 20.04 LTS last month: no (dependency) trouble at all to remove snap and its systemd tentacles...

But now Chromium is no more available as deb, so what to expect ?