Why we're still waiting for Canonical's immutable Ubuntu Core Desktop At this year's Ubuntu Summit in The Hague, we were really hoping to hear some news about Canonical's new immutable desktop distro. It was a hot topic this time last year, and since it did not arrive alongside Noble Numbat in April, we were expecting it would appear alongside last month's Oracular Oriole – but no. While an …
I “updated” from Ubuntu 22 to 24, and I regret it. They’ve enforced a lot more ‘snap,’ in particular the Firefox browser. Every bootup is “system error has occurred, share with Ubuntu?” I have no idea what the error is but I suspect it is ‘snap’. I use the Foxit pdf reader, and it is almost obscenely slow to respond. Even though Foxit is “tabbed,” each pdf opens in a new instance. I splurged on 128GB of ram so I could manipulate large data sets but I suspect the Ubuntu is sprawling large and wasting that resource. Another thing, the Nautilus file manager is becoming as buggy and unresponsive as Windows Explorer! There used to be a neat extension you could install and easily calculate Hashes for any file. Now Nautilus doesn’t even give you a file size in bytes.
I’m beginning to think I should switch to Debian, or Mint, or something.
The kicker was when I forced it to install the apt version of Firefox, and tried some of the hacks people are using to keep out the snap version, and it managed to undo all of that and go back to snap.
I have another chassis kicking around downstairs that I think is going to be trialling Mint if not Debian. Ubuntu 24 is definitely worse than 22 and I think cannot be undone, this descent into snap packages seems to be a bad direction. Thank goodness for alternate distros!
If you don't know that the error is Snap, it seems a little premature to be blaming it for your ills. You might investigate to determine whether Snap is really the problem behind each of the problems you have. For instance, I don't use Foxit, but I don't see why Snap would make it open things in new instances, so you might want to check what the method you're using to open the file is doing and if you could change it.
I also have issue that I know are snap related. One of my work requirements is to use a badge reader with a PKS library that is configured in Firefox as a security device. After the upgrade to 22.04 which made Firefox a snap, it broke that. Since snap packages have their own virtual filesystem, I can't load the library and it makes Ubuntu useless for that application.
I've had zero problems going from 22.04 to 24.04. As for memory usage, top is currently reporting 2131.8 MiB used, including several applications such as Firefox. If you have 128GB of RAM, then the amount being used by Ubuntu and Firefox is barely a rounding error for your PC.
As for Nautlius supposedly not reporting file sizes, it certainly does when I use it. Right click on file, select properties, then hover the mouse over the file size and it reports the size down to the last byte.
As for Nautilus extensions to show file hashes, four different ones show up in the repos if you ask apt. Take your pick, although I have no intention of trying them.
And if the Foxit extension is "obscenely slow", then don't use it. The PDF reader built into Firefox works just fine, use that instead. It's fast, it scrolls smoothly, and it displays everything just fine.
We get the picture. You don't know much about Ubuntu, but decided to hack away at the innards to make it "better", and now it's f*cked. But it's definitely not your fault, so siree, it's the fault of Ubuntu because you don't make mistakes. I don't think that switching distros or even using a different OS altogether is going to solve that sort of problem.
You've got 128GB of RAM. Try installing KVM and then installing Linux in a VM and try out your hackery in there before experimenting on your actual PC.
"The kicker was when I forced it to install the apt version of Firefox, and tried some of the hacks people are using to keep out the snap version, and it managed to undo all of that and go back to snap."
From my install notes removing the snap works perfectly as does using the tarball I downloaded from the Mozilla site to use in my ~/bin directory. It updates flawlessly ever time new version comes out.
"Now I see that snap garbage first it. First to get rid of the firefox to use the self-installed in the ~/bin.
root@8400:~# snap list
Name Version Rev Tracking Publisher Notes
bare 1.0 5 latest/stable canonical✓ base
core20 20220318 1405 latest/stable canonical✓ base
firefox 99.0.1-1 1232 latest/stable/… mozilla✓ -
gnome-3-38-2004 0+git.1f9014a 99 latest/stable/… canonical✓ -
gtk-common-themes 0.1-79-ga83e90c 1534 latest/stable/… canonical✓ -snap
snapd 2.54.4 15177 latest/stable canonical✓ snapd
root@8400:~# snap remove --purge firefox
firefox removed
root@8400:~# snap remove --purge gnome-3-38-2004
gnome-3-38-2004 removed
root@8400:~# snap remove --purge gtk-common-themes
gtk-common-themes remove
root@8400:~# snap remove --purge bare
bare removed
root@8400:~# snap remove --purge core20
core20 removed
root@8400:~# snap remove --purge snapd
snapd removed
root@8400:~# apt remove --autoremove snapd
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
libsnapd-qt1 plasma-discover-backend-snap snapd squashfs-tools
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 4 to remove and 180 not upgraded.
After this operation, 90.5 MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
root@8400:~# rm -r snap/
root@8400:~# cat /etc/apt/preferences.d/nosnap.pref
# To prevent repository packages from triggering the installation of snap,
# this file forbids snapd from being installed by APT.
Package: snapd
Pin: release a=*
Pin-Priority: -10"
The snap has never darkened my doorstep since this was done ages ago.
I'm another non-fan of snap.
The system we use here is to give the users a home directory that is an NFS-4 fileshare mounted off a remote file server. This is for an educational establishment so we would very much like a user's files and desktop modifications to follow them around, hence this solution works very well. Or rather it did, until more and more snaps started to be introduced. Snaps don't work on NFS-4 fileshares.
On a system where the users' home directory is a fileshare, it is very useful to also have a local user with sudo access, so you can get into systems where the network or the fileshare is broken. On these the user with the local home directory cannot have it in /home, so instead we put it in /localhome.
Guess what, Snaps don't like home directories placed anywhere save for /home
Now, you could possibly forgive Snaps for not liking NFS-4 where default permissions prevent anyone save the user whose share it is from looking at it, if you were charitable. If you weren't and took the view that sudo is a very useful command then you'd not forgive that. However even the most charitable person in the world saves a little spot of hatred for morons who hardcode directories in their code, instead of using system variables like everyone else does.
That's why I don't like snaps.
> Guess what, Snaps don't like home directories placed anywhere save for /home
That, and this kind of thing, is 100% legitimate and it is fair.
Modern Linux is trying to automate and simplify more and more stuff and it's going to break more and more old-time Unix tools and methods.
Fedora is considering adopting systemd-homed:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd-homed
[sarcasm] This will banish the antiquated notion of having a "directory" as your home at all [/sarcasm] replacing it with on-demand encrypted volumes which can be on removable media.
These folks do not use computers like I do. Increasingly, what they want is far removed from how I work, and I don't consider what I do to be fancy.
At the same time, there's also a new immutable Arch-based distro called "KDE Linux" planned that might complement or replace KDE Neon.
And then there's Fedora Kinoite/Silverblue and OpenSUSE Kalpa/Aeon. It's exciting to see so many immutable distros. The big downside is the lack of Flatpak apps especially when it comes to system components. Snap is obviously better suited for this, e.g. if you want to run Virt-Manager this could be packaged as a Snap but not as a Flatpak.
As I understand it, Flatpack isn't really able to a lot of things which Snap can. It was a very narrow solution to portable packaging of GUI apps rather than a general solution for software in general.
Snap evolved out of Ubuntu Phone, and was one of the bits of that project which were later repurposed for other things. Currently it's being used for embedded and cloud applications. What's different about Ubuntu Core as compared to at least some other immutable OS projects is that the actual OS part is broken up into several smaller snaps which can be exchanged in a mix and match fashion rather than being one big chunk.
As stated in the story, what they are trying to figure out now is how to split the desktop up into multiple chunks as well. From the sounds of it they want something that works for KDE and possibly others as well, and not just a Gnome only solution.
For a linux distro to qualify for my use cases, I do three simple things:
- remove/delete snap
- remove/delete flatpak
- remove/delete pulseaudio/jack audio
If they are still working after that they get tested.
KDE is now so tied into pulse, removing pulse removes the KDE desktop,... there are others as well. Remove "plank" and the related desktop gets blasted. All very strange.
My daily driver now is Zorin but with the pending apocalypse of desktops not using X11, I am now testing debian server with fluxbox and tint2 for my specialized app stacks. Will still use Zorin after the apocalypse for dev/test but deploy on debian server with fluxbox and tint2.
Peter
Although it's not fluxbox, labwc is a very good replacement for openbox, with waybar doing some of what tint2 does. I realize this doesn't solve your issue if wayland was the only thing available--and also, I suspect that X will be around for a very long time.
> It's pretty much dead in the water then, apart from hard core zealots who will push it anyway.
Yeah, no.
I have news for you. The most widely-used desktop Linux in the world is immutable, has no package manager at all of any form, and no native apps.
And about 10x as many people use it as every other graphical FOSS Unix-like OS put together.
It's ChromeOS, and it gets a couple of hundred million new users a year. (Some are probably upgrading, to be fair.)
Modern macOS is also effectively immutable. iOS definitely is. So is Android in the ways that matter.
Users of immutable OSes outnumber all the mutable OSes, Windows and every other Linux and BSD, put together, by something like 100x over.
They don't know and they don't care.
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