On 2023 Ubuntu 18 LTS support will end, so I started to evaluate the next LTS release, Ubuntu 20.
I installed it on my home machines but… first of all snap daemon is installed by default and it is quite invasive.
Snaps are not very nice in my humble opinion (and not only in mine) because:
-
- Updates are done without your control
- Often the sandbox make it difficult to use software, so you end up giving full access rights or to make a standard apt install
- From an article on CLAU.NET (which also show you how to uninstall snap daemon) we read:
Starting from Ubuntu 20.04, the problem with the Snap has become even greater because, by default, the new version of the Canonical operating system includes several Snap packages that replace the previous binaries and the installation of the new software gives the priority to the Snap system.
- Snap server is not open source and it is controlled only by Canonical:
Clement Lefebvre (Linux Mint founder and project leader) has written that Snap is biased and has a conflict of interest. The reasons he cited include it being governed by Canonical and locked to their store, and also that Snap works better on Ubuntu than on other distributions.
From wikipedia - Last but not least, there is already a snap implementation: it is called docker.
For instance this alias# My Snap replacement called...docker alias bashly='docker run --rm -it --volume "$PWD:/app" dannyben/bashly' bashly init
is an example from the bashly project which show you how download & run software without requiring an “install”. It could not be perfect but works well for some use cases
So I do not want snaps on my servers, and I do not want it on a server install for sure.
So it is time to move away from Ubuntu.
I started to fire a Debian 11 distribution with podman, virtualized with a tiny Qemu.
Debian 11 on server install need less then 2GB of disk space, so it is a perfect fit with a micro instance on a cloud provider (like AWS or Linode).
I think it could be a feasible solution for servers install.