2020-06-21

Golfrun reloaded in lisp?

Currently I’m mainly trying to learn more about electronics and hardware, beyond the basic things I already knew (also opened a new Italian blog to dump whatever related — everything indeed begins from my dad’s death and his stuffs). But I never stop to try and learn other things, especially in the software field where I feel more comfortable.

2020-06-20

Snap the back of those snaps

I’ve already said how annoying Ubuntu is getting. Already said something about that crappy things they call snaps, that idiotic insane attempt to replace the honorable and mostly working and easy enough (from the users’ point of view) usual package system used by Debian and other “.deb” distros, with the “.rpm” as competing school (and few others in other distros).

Leaving apart the fact that snaps are old (already) ideas rebranded, likely modified a little in details the common users don’t care about… but anyway… And leaving apart the fact that if I want something like that, I can AppImage or flatpack, and even docker at last. So, nobody needed snaps.

Let’s fake I forget the fact that this change is pushed in a microsofterish way, and let’s fake there could be some kind of merit in whatever snaps do and how they do it…

No wait, I really can’t fake this. And for some reasons.

There are several ways this CRAPPY CANONICAL THING called snaps is polluting my system with unwanted, annoying artifacts.

  • A new folder, snap, in my home; because it seems I’ve already 4 snaps which needed that: gnome-calculator, gnome-characters, gnome-system-monitor and shotcut
  • 2.9 Gbyte taken in /var/lib/snapd — I guess apt would get as much for the same amount of software installed…?

Ok, you can leave with those, can’t you?

And what about the pollution of mount points? It’s unbearable.

$ mount |grep -c snap
26

And the whole system isn’t converted to snaps yet. What would it be when almost everything will be a snap? Moreover, a single snap produces several mount points; e.g. gnome-characters has two, and also gnome-calculator has two. Then there are mount points taken for snapcraft (part of the snap system, I suppose); and core appears 4 times.

var/lib/snapd/snaps/core18_1705.snap on /snap/core18/1705 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,x-gdu.hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/core18_1754.snap on /snap/core18/1754 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,x-gdu.hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/core_9289.snap on /snap/core/9289 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,x-gdu.hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/core_9066.snap on /snap/core/9066 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,x-gdu.hide)

Nice, isn’t it? So, once I did mount to take a look at few more interesting things; now I have to filter those shit out.

There’s still more noise I used to remember, and it can be also because of that shit, again. For instance1,

When hardware is assigned to the snap, a device cgroup is set up with default devices

and that can explain partly the explosion of cgroup lines when I do mount.

Ok, it’s nice that for your security they are polluting that too. No big deal. (It’s shit but who cares?)

Then the other day I was playing with loop devices; it’s hard I didn’t find one available at the second try… This time, no luck. Why? And so I’ve found another by-product of that shit:

$ losetup -l
NAME        SIZELIMIT OFFSET AUTOCLEAR RO BACK-FILE                                          DIO LOG-SEC
/dev/loop1          0      0         1  1 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/gtk-common-themes_1474.snap     0     512
/dev/loop19         0      0         1  1 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/gnome-characters_539.snap       0     512
/dev/loop17         0      0         1  1 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/shotcut_64.snap                 0     512
/dev/loop8          0      0         1  1 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/gnome-3-28-1804_116.snap        0     512
/dev/loop25         0      0         1  1 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/gnome-logs_93.snap              0     512
/dev/loop15         0      0         1  1 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/gnome-characters_550.snap       0     512
/dev/loop6          0      0         1  1 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/gnome-system-monitor_145.snap   0     512
/dev/loop23         0      0         1  1 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/gnome-3-34-1804_33.snap         0     512
/dev/loop13         0      0         1  1 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/kotlin_43.snap                  0     512
/dev/loop4          0      0         1  1 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/gnome-system-monitor_148.snap   0     512
/dev/loop21         0      0         1  1 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/gtk-common-themes_1506.snap     0     512
/dev/loop11         0      0         1  1 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/core18_1754.snap                0     512
/dev/loop2          0      0         1  1 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/snapcraft_4892.snap             0     512
/dev/loop0          0      0         1  1 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/snapcraft_4862.snap             0     512
/dev/loop18         0      0         1  1 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/gnome-calculator_748.snap       0     512
/dev/loop9          0      0         1  1 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/gnome-calculator_730.snap       0     512
/dev/loop16         0      0         1  1 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/core_9066.snap                  0     512
/dev/loop7          0      0         1  1 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/shotcut_61.snap                 0     512
/dev/loop24         0      0         1  1 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/gnome-3-26-1604_100.snap        0     512
/dev/loop14         0      0         1  1 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/gnome-3-34-1804_36.snap         0     512
/dev/loop5          0      0         1  1 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/gnome-logs_100.snap             0     512
/dev/loop22         0      0         1  1 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/kotlin_42.snap                  0     512
/dev/loop12         0      0         1  1 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/gnome-3-28-1804_128.snap        0     512
/dev/loop3          0      0         1  1 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/core18_1705.snap                0     512
/dev/loop20         0      0         1  1 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/gnome-3-26-1604_98.snap         0     512
/dev/loop10         0      0         1  1 /var/lib/snapd/snaps/core_9289.snap                  0     512

Really. Are you all serious about appreciating this shit on your daily desktop system?

Let’s say it again and loud:

Snap sucks

I’m going to leave Ubuntu because of this new level of shiny shit, hoping other distros won’t follow it. This is a strage world: the other day I’ve also read that new version of Nautilus removed the ability to split the view in two panes. This means that it once could do it. Why would you remove such a feature? Maybe because a bunch of developer of Nautilus didn’t use it… So, let’s remove it?

Other things disappeared long time ago, because GNOME is going crap too (slightly better now but still, not so good as it used to be). For example in GNOME Terminal I was used to set the tab title. No more of this. And there are other small things missing because of the “progress” of the GNOME desktop. Each time one has to adapt to a new level of silliness: apps are stripped of features they once had, and the real reason of this is… I don’t know, but I call idiots programmers responsible for some of those crappy changes.

It’s still kind of a shocking memory the “feature” a programmer decided for the move to trash behaviour — too dangerous… if you moved your files in the trashcan by error, it’d have been really a problem! (Already insulted that programmer; luckly the change was later reverted and GNOME’s file manager now behave normally)


  1. Ok, it’s about the core product; but I suspect the song is almost the same for usual desktop.↩︎