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Linux reviews notes that
The popular Linux Mint operating system has decided to purge the snap package manager from its repositories and forbid installation of it. The motivation for this drastic move is that the upstream Ubuntu Linux distribution Linux Mint is based on will stealthily install snapd and use that to install Chromium from the Canonical-controlled SnapCraft instead of installing a regular Chromium package like most users expect.
The Linux Mint blog has this to say about Ubuntu's use of snap to use their chromium package to subvert apt:
You've as much empowerment with this as if you were using proprietary software, i.e. none. This is in effect similar to a commercial proprietary solution, but with two major differences: It runs as root, and it installs itself without asking you.
Is Ubuntu turning evil?
(Score: 4, Touché) by RamiK on Thursday July 09 2020, @06:52PM (5 children)
The people who invented Unix disagree [wikipedia.org]...
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by SDRefugee on Thursday July 09 2020, @08:02PM (4 children)
The "people who invented Unix" meant for everything to be a FILE, NOT every application being mounted as a fileSYSTEM.. Ramik is absolutely
CORRECT!!! Damn snaps pollute a "df" with a /dev/loopx fileSYSTEM for each and every snap you are tricked into installing or choose to install..
Seriously considering moving from Ubuntu to Devuan (Don't get me started on systemd... smh)...
America should be proud of Edward Snowden, the hero, whether they know it or not..
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2020, @08:34PM
You've piqued my curiosity. What is this systemd of which you speak?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Subsentient on Thursday July 09 2020, @11:55PM (1 child)
I agree, that always bothered the hell out of me. Fuck snaps. Just make a regular RPM or something. Or hell, just make a tarball with all the shared libraries in the same folder as the executable, and e.g. export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=`pwd`.
Lots of developers used to do that, I wish they'd do it again. I had no issues with little tarballs of binaries like that. It was kinda convenient, just keep it in ~/ and open the executable when you want to use it.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2020, @01:36AM
"Or hell, just make a tarball" - Welcome to Slackware! This is how we do it.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by RamiK on Friday July 10 2020, @02:18AM
Actually in Plan 9 applications did in fact expose much of their interfaces via the 9p protocol for the explicit purpose of being mounted in the filesystem for both IPC, network transparency and user interactivity. e.g. Your text editor would have its file menu and window content (buffers/tabs) as files nested in directories and (union) mounted in the namespace so you could write scripts using whatever you want to program new commands (buttons) so there was no need for macro or extension languages. Another example was how this was applied to the windowing system so you could dispense with header files and specialized protocols and just walk the filesystem and modify a few files to manipulate window positioning and the likes...
So, while linux containers and namespaces are bastardizing plan9, the way plan9port was made, how many Bell Labs veterans use OSX and how Go compiles statically are clear indication the Labs veterans aren't too shy from deviating from Unix, POSIX or Plan9 when they want to get something done.
Bib:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140906153815/http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/names.html [archive.org]
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