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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday July 09 2020, @06:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the working-behind-your-back dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Thursday July 09 2020, @10:16PM (5 children)

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 09 2020, @10:16PM (#1018849) Homepage Journal

    There's guix, which claims to be able to handle multiple versions of the same package to handle depedency hell. Every package gets its own set of (shared) versions of packages it depends on.

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  • (Score: 2) by Marand on Saturday July 11 2020, @02:10PM (4 children)

    by Marand (1081) on Saturday July 11 2020, @02:10PM (#1019502) Journal

    There's also Nix, which did it first and gave Guix the idea. Guix just copied the it, but using GNU-approved Guile Scheme for the package description and configuration language instead of a custom language like Nix uses. This would be a great thing, since you can use a nice, fully-featured, and powerful language instead of someone's in-house custom PL. But unfortunately they also went full GNU, which means odds are it will be less useful than Nix for use on a real system due to having fewer packages (14k for Guix, 60k for Nix) and no access to things like non-free firmware. So you're back to dealing with Nix and its weird not-quite-Haskell language.

    Guix is a great idea but in the real world, if you want an actually useful system, you should never go full GNU.

    • (Score: 2) by Subsentient on Saturday July 11 2020, @02:46PM (1 child)

      by Subsentient (1111) on Saturday July 11 2020, @02:46PM (#1019523) Homepage Journal

      You went full GNU. Never go full GNU.

      --
      "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
      • (Score: 2) by Marand on Saturday July 11 2020, @03:38PM

        by Marand (1081) on Saturday July 11 2020, @03:38PM (#1019549) Journal

        :D

        That was what I was going for but I decided not to go with a direct quote. Glad it didn't get missed despite that.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2020, @05:34PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2020, @05:34PM (#1019606)

      i installed guix and it didn't work out of the box. end of test.

    • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday July 13 2020, @04:51PM

      by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 13 2020, @04:51PM (#1020441) Homepage Journal

      I suppose it would still be possible for a distro to use guix but choose to have guix access its own guix-compatible repositories.