On 08/10/2025 3:57 AM CDT Ron via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org> wrote:
CAREY SCHUG via Talk wrote on 2025-08-09 15:09:
I know ubuntu is evil
It is not evil, actually. Neither is Canonical.
apologies, must have been tired. Should have said --> ubuntu is "evil" <-- i.e. not liked, has problems/detractors/haters
I realize Carey might not be expressing his own opinion, but that of a small niche group of zealots, but I'll address this to those folks.
True of course, though I do agree to some extent with the zealots, especially that they to some extent "bully" others. ...
I guess one alternative is to find non-snap installs.
I've done that with Thunderbird & Firefox. The snaps were pretty nice, but I think clicking a mailto: link in Firefox didn't open an email in Thunderbird due to the confinement (sandboxing) level that Mozilla chose.
I'm guessing that is why when I right click a page in a chromium derived browser, select print, it hightlights the default name, but I can't just type a new name, i have to manually re-select the default name? Except that every now and then it WILL work for a while, then stop again. I thought at one point it worked for a while after a reboot, but then it didn't. I use the print-to-pdf to save some things, like whenever i buy something online, i prepend the date purchased, when it arrives in add in the date arrived. If I want more later I can search files to find the it again.
But, for node.js, having snaps has been great. They're not confined and it's nice to be able to run multiple versions concurrently.
Is there a "for REAL dummies" on that? several MAJOR releases ago I had a hyper multi timer that I really loved (it was developed for one game, but I used it for other things too). Developer was gone and old code would not run, maybe because new js was different? are the old versions available? It was mostly for a game, so I haven't worked on it that hard.
Is there any possibility snaps will de-duplicate in the future, or does the basis for how they work make that impossible?
Who knows? That would be a *lot* of work, so I doubt it.
AFAICS snaps are single files in /var/lib/snapd/snaps so this novice doesn't see how any "deduplication" could be done. most recently, when the root partition was almost full, there were the lastest two levels of something over a gb each. I kinda-remembered that was installed for something else that I didn't like and removed, but of course the removal of the end-user part did not remove the support layer it made me put in. at least I hoped i rememberes, so I went through the removal command and was not warned it would force something else to be removed, crossed my fingers and confirmed. seems to be ok. Over a year ago I had a problem where the old snaps were not automaically removed, and with my browsers revising every week or two, that kept filling my snaps directory and I had to manually remove the old ones. Eventually I did find a fix on the internet, don't recall what it was.
File systems like ZFS have built-in de-duplication, so that's an option.
IIRC, you can's Reiser root, so that would mean repartitioning everything, not possible for me without a fresh install on new hardware (and converting filesystems probably needs a clean fresh install anyway).
It'll use more in memory & CPU usage, so expanding disk space is probably cheaper.
My current system was purchased with excess memory and cpu for my normal usage, because the last install suffered memory leaks and (not sure of the term) things like zombies but still consuming CPU. Both of those required a reboot every 5-10 days.
it seems to me that this way I could have several versions of some basic tool installed, and different applications would just automatically use the correct one.
That's something snaps can help with - multiple versions.
But probably not do-able via $path because applications are installed using system-wide libraries normally.
I meant to suggest an ENHANCEMENT/UPGRADE to $PATH processing where programs and directories would have flags so the actual usage of $PATH would know to redirect to the correct actual directory FOR THAT REFERENCE ONLY. meaning a table so that if I am using the fortranv1 directory vs the fortranv2 directory some entries in the $PATH are internally & dynamically switched per the table of what version demands and one uses mathpackv4 while the other uses mathpackv7 although the $PATH actually contains "mathpack" only. In practice, I thought it would be that path includes a character not allowed in a filename, but i was disabused of that by asking for characters not allowed, and maybe it would be something like "mathpack?" would send the internal processing to see if that should be "mathpackv4" vs "mathpackv7". If someone really had a ? in a directory name, it would have to be escaped in $PATH. Maybe there are complactions that make this not possible? Or in my ignorance I am completely confused and off base?
help us ubuntu-morons transition to flatpacks
apt install flatpak
Step one of 5? 50? Do I have to create my own flatpacks from the normal install? And the fear it would break something else to have both. Found this, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24383561 though will not consider switching to RPMs (first suggestion). Maybe think about straight Debian or Mint (which I think some friends were pushing a while ago, though not any more). Probably should just search for apt install package for my browser for now,