No hate to Ubuntu LTS (my old OS) as I think for an entry to Linux, it’s about the best there is, and then I just got used to it and then I started getting more and more annoyed with Snaps.

FFWD a couple of years and I decided to switch to Mint but I wanted something that was entirely free of Snaps, not just blocked, so LMDE seemed the best fit. I get all the good bits of Mint without the Canonical enforced stuff. It’s been running a week now and after plenty of tweaks (installing Gnome for example) looks and feels exactly how I wanted it without interference from Canonical.

  • JTskulk@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    11 months ago

    Here’s my bad experience with snaps back when I ran Kubuntu. I thought I’d give it a try, maybe it’ll be like systemd where lots of people loudly complain but it works and it’s something slightly different to learn.

    My Firefox was automatically moved to snap. First of all, I noticed that there was a slight delay whenever I clicked a link outside of Firefox that wasn’t there before. I think it also switched the file picker back to gtk which I hate and it moved my config to somewhere funny. So I get a popup saying that there’s an update for Firefox, and that I need to close it. Normally with apt I just do the update and then restart later. So I close Firefox and… nothing. No user feedback, I can’t tell if it’s doing anything. I assume it’s done and I reopen it. Nope, I get the same popup later. I guess I didn’t leave it closed long enough. The whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth. Canonical is pushing their homegrown software on me because they want to compete with flatpak or whatever, and they made my user experience worse as a result. I gained nothing from this except frustration and distrust that lead to me switching distros when I built a new machine. Snaps also spam your df output with all their different crap that gets mounted. I ended up removing snap and using the Mozilla PPA and was happy again.