To be fair, Snappy isn't aimed at "mission critical systems", nor even at bandwidth constrained users. It's a straightforward, reasonably robust and obviously used mechanism for pushing routine consumer software. In that realm, the aggregate benefit to society of having everyone running current software outweighs the annoyance of the specialists, sorry. It's always been this way.
If you are running "mission critical" software, you need to be using a packaging mechanism (c.f. Docker) which lives at a lower level and provides harder guarantees about what you're running. Those solutions exist, they just aren't Snappy.
Ubuntu is sending out "Mission critical" software as snaps: I think the biggest offender has been LXD, but I'm sure there's others.
That combined with Ubuntu forcing snaps as the main packaging method (i.e. you have to jump through various hoops to install .debs of snaps) is what a lot of the outrage about.
(Side note: Something about listing Docker as a packaging mechanism makes me uncomfortable. IMO Docker and containers in general are deployment tools, not packaging systems)
> IMO Docker and containers in general are deployment tools, not packaging systems
Obviously it sits at the boundary, but a "Dockerfile" is (at least when properly used) a recipe for reliably reproducing a specific version of software packaged in a format that can be deployed to all sorts of systems with absolutely minimal dependence on host configuration.
That's what people who want a "mission critical Snap" almost certainly want.
LXD is a weird one, it doesn't seem that suitable for distribution as a snap in the first place. The filesystem become a magical bundle of weirdness when you use the snap version. Also LXD is something I’m not that happy to have auto updating, I would like to roll it out to a test, preprod or staging environment first.
To me snaps seems like a desktop solution that Ubuntu forgot to disable on the server edition.
> If you are running "mission critical" software, you need to be using a packaging mechanism (c.f. Docker) which lives at a lower level and provides harder guarantees about what you're running. Those solutions exist, they just aren't Snappy.
What? No it doesn't live at lower level. Docker uses same Linux APIs as Snappy.
The only upside of Docker when compared to Snappy is that it doesn't turn your hardware into zombie execution unit constantly pulling code from mothership (Canonical).
> In that realm, the aggregate benefit to society of having everyone running current software outweighs the annoyance of the specialists, sorry. It's always been this way.
There's in fact an easy way to satisfy both groups, but for some weird reason Canonical chose to turn every user into zombie execution unit, no matter the level of proficiency. It's not like a patch to disable this malware behavior would be hard to submit, but it's crystal clear it'd be rejected.
And it's clearly not for causal user benefit. They have documented switches to postpone calls to mothership. That's command line realm for experienced users.
I honestly wonder what their real motivation is. Those who seek to take back the control are people who want to control their own machines. The only thing that comes to mind is that sometime in future blog posts recommending to disable automatic updates would crop up and those dumb pesky users would just copy paste it into console without much thinking.
I think the issue is we expect Ubuntu to not only design features for common folk but also have an easy to use solution for the type of tech literate people that Linux attracts.
They have prioritized snaps but how have they made life easier for those of us running "mission critical" software?
If you are running "mission critical" software, you need to be using a packaging mechanism (c.f. Docker) which lives at a lower level and provides harder guarantees about what you're running. Those solutions exist, they just aren't Snappy.