** Official Ubuntu Thread **

Thunderbird is being moved over to snap and they plan on releasing an all snap desktop in a few months built around Ubuntu Core.

I dont like how some apps are shunning snaps in favour of flatpak.

The community needs to just decide on one and make it the best it can be.

Looks like Flatpak is gonna be the winner though due to security.
 
Last edited:
I dont like how some apps are shunning snaps in favour of flatpak.

The community needs to just decide on one and make it the best it can be.

Unfortunately, it's nothing to do with the community, the vocal community is against snaps, however Canonical are being Canonical, just as they did with Mir/Unity and pushing ahead, and then no doubt in a few years they'll give up and deprecate them. It's super frustrating from a user perspective, but this is part of FOSS unfortunately.
 

Really can't see the point of any of them to be frank. Just go to your package manager and install what you need/want.

Your average Ubuntu user doesn't understand the necessary hooks and apt pinning to override the snap/snap core on installs and canonical is pushing snaps as a enhanced security feature rather than its flaws.
 
Canonical's Snap store found to be distributing malware

Canonical, the software company behind Ubuntu, came under scrutiny this week with regards to its Snap software repository and the processes by which software authors can publish packages in their curated store. One of the reasons Linux distributions tend to provide central software repositories is to provide users with software which has been tested and verified as safe to use in some fashion. This past week Alan Pope reported a Snap package claiming to be a Bitcoin wallet called Exodus was downloaded from Canonical's Snap repository and used to steal digital coins from its user. An examination of the malicious package revealed it was a low effort piece of malware which should have been caught if Canonical had any vetting processes in place. Pope's overview of the malicious package reveals the details:

"I wanted to take a look at the application itself. So on my workstation, in a separate virtual machine, I ran 'snap download exodus' to download, but not install the application. I don't have any cryptocurrency wallets on my system, but I didn't know what the application might try to do, so for safety I didn't run it directly on my computer. A snap is just a squashfs file, typically containing an application, libraries, assets and metadata. I unpacked the snap with unsquashfs and briefly poked around at the resulting files. Notably much of the metadata in the snap.yaml file was still the developer defaults such as 'Single-line elevator pitch for your amazing snap'. Further investigation revealed this was an application developed using Flutter. The application binary was quite small, and there weren't a lot of bundled libraries beyond the essentials, potentially indicating limited features." The offending application has since been quarantined to prevent it from spreading.

Sigh, never ends!

Alan Pope was never happy about snaps and took a step back from being a lead developer at the time and has now posted this on the dev forum that he no longer wants to run the UK section either.

I’m keen to find a new leader for the UK LoCo.
I sadly no longer have the energy or enthusiasm to continue working on this.
 
Ubuntu was the first distro I ever used but after playing around with a few others I switched for reasons similar to this. So my absolute favourite distro is OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and if that is not available for some reason then I go with Fedora.

I was just playing around on the Oracle Cloud and it seems that they push Oracle Linux (no surprise) and Ubuntu. I think you can run your own distro but they it make it more difficult than AWS.
 
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (codenamed ‘Noble Numbat’) has been released.

Comical that they are now blocking 3rd-party deb files for security but they seem perfectly happy with bitcoin miner infected snaps.
 
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (codenamed ‘Noble Numbat’) has been released.

Comical that they are now blocking 3rd-party deb files for security but they seem perfectly happy with bitcoin miner infected snaps.
The Snap double down is so weird. Linux desktop suffers in the app space so why not all work towards a single solution to encourage developers to release their apps on Linux.
 

Has Canonical backed the wrong horse? One concerned community dev told me the Flutter roadmap for 2024 has deprioritised desktop features — a sign they say doesn’t bode well for its future nor their enthusiasm to build apps using it.

Things just get worse and worse, it's almost comical.
 
I think allowing yourself to rely on Google for anything is going to end up in tears
I wouldn’t be surprised if they dropped Gmail one day - crazy company.

I like Ubuntu; have it on a media system and in WSL, but the profiteering side might slowly kill it off. I enjoy Fedora and openSuse seems worth a try. PopOS might be where it’s at if everything works out.
 
as someone who hasn't used Ubuntu for a little while... should I be concerned at the last few comments... I was going to use it for a new plex server build
 
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (codenamed ‘Noble Numbat’) has been released.

Comical that they are now blocking 3rd-party deb files for security but they seem perfectly happy with bitcoin miner infected snaps.
Canonical is outlining plans for Ubuntu 24.10 which will be launched in October 2024. Some of the plans include switching to a Wayland session by default, even when using NVIDIA drivers, getting Ubuntu Core Desktop ready for general use and making the software centre work with third-party Deb packages.

LOL :D
 
I posted this on the Snapcraft Forum, regarding my concern about how to get support with Snaps:

the response I got was less than encouraging for two reasons:

Despite being a concern that applies to countless standard Snaps, there was virtually no response. There certainly was no response from anyone at Canonical or on the Desktop Team.

This quote from the major response I got: it’s almost like Canonical have given up and don’t care about this anymore.

A moderator is not happy.
 
Back
Top Bottom