Ubuntu Delays Transition To Snap'ed CUPS Print Server

[JEBjames]

Michael

Wording error?

"Due to the CUPS Snap but being in good enough shape" probably meant not instead of but.

[anarki2]

Right after they just broke snap for a ton of users? Good decision.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/snapd/+bug/2032679

[ed31337]

I hate snaps. They take up more disk space, take longer to start up, and they take up a lot more memory than if you just used the Debian deb's of the same. Back when I was using Ubuntu, I de-snapified everything and it was so much better.

OTOH, the downside of de-snapifying my system was the Debian deb's were usually a slightly older version of the app. This led me to switch to Gentoo. If Ubuntu forces me to tinker so much to get my system running right, why not? With Gentoo, I get all the benefits of not having any snaps (by default), plus I have easy access to all the very latest versions of everything instead of using slightly stale software.

[Tuxee]

So, we're going Windows on people? Not even Microsoft would do something as dumb as pushing a print spooler to "an app".

That's because snaps are not only "apps" but also services. And since CUPS is a server - why not containerize it? That's what happens a gazillion times everywhere on servers.

[espi]

So, we're going Windows on people? Not even Microsoft would do something as dumb as pushing a print spooler to "an app".

The sad thing is that I can't even blame Ubuntu for this. They've always been plagued with having to come up with new ideas no matter how ridiculous they are. Examples include Mir, bringing back Compiz, and at some point even supporting ZFS on root something. Nevertheless, just because they have issues (and I sympathize with them) that are making them do such things, you and I as responsible knowledgeable people who know better.

Right now I think Ubuntu could just be Debian with predictable release schedule and longer support, capitalizing on the huge Debian repositories and existing knowledge. That's all they need to take the entire "Debian on business" cake and a large portion of Linux desktop users.

They try to innovate way too hard and it backfires pretty badly, wasting resources and making Ubuntu worse in general. It's pretty sad to watch.

[spyke]

Pushing built-in system driver or library software to Snap makes totally no sense to me. Can anyone explain what's the advantage of that?

In Ubuntu Core and Desktop Core everything (even kernel and drivers) are snaps. This allows you to switch them to different tracks that better suit your needs. In case of a normal Ubuntu Desktop moving CUPS to a snap is done the be able to have fresher CUPS on LTS and also isolate legacy printing drivers (old printers with proprietary drivers will get them installed as a confined snap, which is nice for security and system stability). I hope there will be something similar for Flatpak as well.

[Britoid]

That's because snaps are not only "apps" but also services. And since CUPS is a server - why not containerize it? That's what happens a gazillion times everywhere on servers.

Because CUPS is a system component, and systemd can already do "containerization" of system services.

[Vistaus]

Why still CUPS, though? I thought there was a replacement now?

[sarmad]

Pushing built-in system driver or library software to Snap makes totally no sense to me. Can anyone explain what's the advantage of that?

The main advantage is to be able to push updates to the print stack independently from the OS. This will be helpful in keeping the system up to date with newer print drivers.

[onlyLinuxLuvUBack]

It would be a ubuntu shiny-new, if they rewrote it all in rust