Hi,
every day, I'm tempted to run debian or even slackware, just to escape from the endless mill of desktop 'innovation' that characterises the Linux experience. I've learned to fine tune a lot of systems over the years, from VMS and Solaris to Raspbian. It's no longer something that engages me. I don't have a lot of experience with linux window managers, but I think I'll look at icewm or maybe awesome. I want a system I can understand and modify to suit my needs, not one that looks pretty and does everything for me, until it doesn't.
But, it's nice to just install ubuntu and have everything working out of the box.
The problem is, the more bundled things are, the more difficult it is to figure out how they work and how to fix them when they break.
Snap seems like just another level of irritation. Every time I ask my system about disks, I have to grep -v loop to get rid of snap cruft. I keep finding my personal data in the snap directories. Why? Sometimes snap apps take forever to launch...
Obviously I'm impatient and unwilling to learn new concepts. So I decided maybe I should at least learn how to use snap, before being too critical. But googling 'snap' is like googling 'brown'. Where is the project based, and what is the best introduction to it's inner workings?
Also, can I install Ubuntu without installing snap? For that matter, can I install a bare bones Ubuntu, with no default apps, but with devices? Sometimes it feels like setting up a new phone, removing the OEM apps and installing better ones.
UPDATE: Found some info here, and this page has some good stuff, but I'm still interested in responses to my rant. Basically, I'd like to install any snaps on my system myself, not have it done for me, by default, behind my back.
Ok, I've found snapcraft.io
I'm still interested to know, for example, the best way back up config info for snap apps. Is it necessary to examine each snap individually for this kind of stuff?
Potential benefits of using snap:
- high resolution software updates.
- shared libraries can actually be shared
Are there any other benefits of snap, or reasons not to use AppImages instead?
To avoid 'dll hell' on Windows, I usually statically linked my own programs and copied 3rd party/runtime dll's into a program directory along with the main binary. That made the AppImage approach instantly appealing. However, maintaining updates was one downside. For non network connnected apps (very unfortunately a rarity these days) constant updates are of limited interest most of the time.