Nothing is perfect but “fundamentally broken” is bullshit.

Compared on how things used to work when Ubuntu came to life it really is fundamentally broken. I’m not the oldest beard around, but I personally have updated both Debian and Ubuntu from obsoleted relase to a current one with very little hiccups in the way. Apt/dpkg is just so good that you could literally bring up a decade old distribution up to date and it was almost without no efforts. The updates ran whenever I chose them to and didn’t break production servers when unattended upgrades were enabled. This is very much not the case with Ubuntu today.

Hatred for a piece of tech simply because other people said it’s bad, therefore it must be.

I realize that this isn’t directly because of my comment, but there’s plenty of evidence even on this chain that the problems go way deeper than few individuals ranting over the net that snap is bad. As I already said, it’s objectively worse than the alternatives we’ve had since the 90’s. And the way canonical bundles snap with apt breaks that very long tradition where you could just rely that, when running stable distribution, you could be pretty much certain that ‘apt-get dist-upgrade’ wouldn’t break your system. And even if it did, you could always fix it manually and get the thing back to speed. And this isn’t just a old guy ranting how things were better in the past as you can still get the very reliable experience today, but not with snapd.

Auto updating is not inherently bad.

I’m not complaining about auto updates. They are very useful and nice to have, even for advanced users. The problem is that even if snap notification says that ‘software updates now’ it often really doesn’t. Restarting the software, and even some cases running manual update, still brings up the notification that the very same software I updated a second ago needs to restart again to update. Rinse and repeat, while losing your current session over and over again.

Also, there’s absolutely no indication if anything is actually done. The notification just nags that I need to stop what I’m doing RIGHT NOW and let the system do whatever it wants instead of the tools I’ve chosen to work for me. I don’t want nor need the forced interruptions for my workflow, but when I do have the spare minute to stop working, I expect that the update process actually triggers on that very second and not after some random delay and I also want a progress bar or something to indicate when things are complete and I can resume doing whatever I had in mind.

it just can’t be a problem to postpone snap updates with a simple command.

But it is. “<your software> is updating now” message just interrupts pretty much everything I’ve been doing and at that point there’s no way to stop it. And after some update process has finally finalized I need to pretty much reboot to regain control of my system. This is a problem which applies to everybody, regardless of their technical skills.

My computer is a tool and when I need to actively fight that tool to not interrupt whatever I’m doing it rubs me in a very wrong way. No matter if it’s just browsing the web or writing code to the next best thing ever or watching youtube, I expect the system to be stable for as long as I want it to be. Then there’s a separate time slot when the system can update and maybe break itself in the process, but I control when that time slot exists.

There’s not a single case that I’ve encountered where snap actually solved a problem I’ve had and there’s a plenty of times when it was either annoying or just straight up caused more problems. Systemd at least have some advantages over SysVInit, but snap doesn’t have even that.

As mentioned, I’m not the oldest linux guy around, but I’ve been running linux for 20+ years and ~15 of that has kept butter on my bread and snapcraft is easily the most annoying thing that I’ve encountered over that period.