For me the Linux Mint developers’ hostility to snaps (which in my experience tend to be the best trade-offs for my needs) is one of the many reasons I won’t use or suggest Mint.
I mean, analogous to firefox example you supplied, you could just delete nosnap.pref and be on your way.
Also, snapd keeps a snapshot of your per-revision configuration from an app for a while after you remove it. You can run snap saved to see all the current snapshots. It doesn’t remove your $SNAP_USER_COMMON directory for that snap (which is where the Firefox snap stores its profiles), so moving from the snapped Firefox to the version from apt is just a matter of moving the .mozilla directory out of ~/snap/firefox/common to ~/
I could have sworn I checked that, but I was a lot less familiar with these things at the time, so maybe I missed it.
I don’t think snaps are a bad thing on principle, my own bad experiences with them notwithstanding. I could also live with a for-profit operating its own curated package repository as part of its service.
I’d personally prefer not to use a client locked into one particular package provider, but if that’s the tradeoff for that provider’s security guarantee that your packages are all Canonical-certified safe, I’d accept that. If it were preinstalled with an OS, that’s fine. If they make it the default Software Store, we’re on par with the Microsoft Store and other App Stores and those too provide a utility and convenience, particularly for those less technically minded. The ship on “don’t bundle your browser with your OS because that’s monopoly grabbing” has sailed long ago anyway.
All of these are things I’m fine with, even if I personally would choose not to use them. If that was all, I’d still recommend Ubuntu as a beginner distro, because it was my intro to Linux too and I found it good at the time.
The thing that irks me is when they’re being dishonest about it. You no longer wanna support a deb package in your repos? Fine, let me know, offer me a one-click migration option for installing the snap instead and moving my data over, give me the whole marketing routine of telling me how much better your new solution is, but make it my choice.
Having a transition package for a name change or breaking up a larger project into modular packages is one thing. Using it to instead run an entirely different package manager pulling from a proprietary repo?
Worse still, if you had trouble with one app so you went and found a non-snap repo, you pinned it with higher priority, reinstalled it from the new source and thought you were in the clear because that worked as expected.
But you forgot or didn’t know to also put a negative priority on the snap source because pin priorities seem intuitive enough, only for unattended upgrades to look at the pins and say “That sign can’t stop me, because I can’t read” (pins from repos I don’t know) and reinstall the snap…
I get that automatic upgrades don’t pull from all repos by default for security reasons, but at least look at the priorities and realise “Ope, not gonna touch that, I’ll notify the user to do it manually if they trust the update”.
And that, for me, is the part that takes it from apathy to disdain; the part that goes beyond “each distro has its own preferences, no big deal”; the part that reeks of a profit-oriented company aiming for vendor lock-in.
To close the topic out: All of this is just explaining my stance; I’m not telling anyone what to do or not to do. You gave your point, I gave mine. By all means, if it works best for you, I’m not getting in your way. I just wish there was a better option.
I mean, analogous to firefox example you supplied, you could just delete nosnap.pref and be on your way.
I could have sworn I checked that, but I was a lot less familiar with these things at the time, so maybe I missed it.
I don’t think snaps are a bad thing on principle, my own bad experiences with them notwithstanding. I could also live with a for-profit operating its own curated package repository as part of its service. I’d personally prefer not to use a client locked into one particular package provider, but if that’s the tradeoff for that provider’s security guarantee that your packages are all Canonical-certified safe, I’d accept that. If it were preinstalled with an OS, that’s fine. If they make it the default Software Store, we’re on par with the Microsoft Store and other App Stores and those too provide a utility and convenience, particularly for those less technically minded. The ship on “don’t bundle your browser with your OS because that’s monopoly grabbing” has sailed long ago anyway.
All of these are things I’m fine with, even if I personally would choose not to use them. If that was all, I’d still recommend Ubuntu as a beginner distro, because it was my intro to Linux too and I found it good at the time.
The thing that irks me is when they’re being dishonest about it. You no longer wanna support a deb package in your repos? Fine, let me know, offer me a one-click migration option for installing the snap instead and moving my data over, give me the whole marketing routine of telling me how much better your new solution is, but make it my choice.
Having a transition package for a name change or breaking up a larger project into modular packages is one thing. Using it to instead run an entirely different package manager pulling from a proprietary repo?
Worse still, if you had trouble with one app so you went and found a non-snap repo, you pinned it with higher priority, reinstalled it from the new source and thought you were in the clear because that worked as expected.
But you forgot or didn’t know to also put a negative priority on the snap source because pin priorities seem intuitive enough, only for unattended upgrades to look at the pins and say “That sign can’t stop me, because I can’t read” (pins from repos I don’t know) and reinstall the snap…
I get that automatic upgrades don’t pull from all repos by default for security reasons, but at least look at the priorities and realise “Ope, not gonna touch that, I’ll notify the user to do it manually if they trust the update”.
And that, for me, is the part that takes it from apathy to disdain; the part that goes beyond “each distro has its own preferences, no big deal”; the part that reeks of a profit-oriented company aiming for vendor lock-in.
To close the topic out: All of this is just explaining my stance; I’m not telling anyone what to do or not to do. You gave your point, I gave mine. By all means, if it works best for you, I’m not getting in your way. I just wish there was a better option.