Avoiding snaps in Lubuntu 22.04?

[guiverc]

@Rosika2

From all I´ve learnt so far it seems getting rid of snaps in Lubuntu 22.04 is possible but there wouldn´t be a 100% guarantee for not running into any problems at all, right?

Did you get [sufficient] answers to this?

I didn’t respond further as I don’t see that I could provide more.

• I don’t have a crystal ball, so can’t gaze into the future & see what (if any) changes Ubuntu will make into the future.
• On a thinkpad x201 with only 4GB of RAM I initially removed all snap packages (20.04 or focal) and used the deb packages of chromium and it remained that way for much of the time it ran focal. I don’t recall any issues without snapd, but that was a focal install and not jammy, and past isn’t always a great indicator for what will occur in the future. That install is now jammy but I’ve returned to using snap packages on it (I really didn’t notice any improvement with only deb packages in performance)
• if problems occur (see first no crystal ball comment) I don’t see them as any real issue anyway; the most obvious I already mentioned which you saw & quoted anyway, but how difficult or problematic an issue is depends on our skill level, how pressured we are for time when it occurs etc which will vary
• Not really asked, but I don’t see Lubuntu as being any different in this regard to other Ubuntu flavors. Snap packages can remove the packaging time significantly thus some use them for welcome or flavor-specific apps, so removing them will impact the users ability to use those apps/features but that should be obvious.

[Fritz]

Not repeating the pro and con arguments here. If someone really wants to get rid of snaps and still enjoy the beauty and elegancy of LXQt, a good alternative to Lubuntu is SparkyLinux.

I have been using it for several weeks now on my summer laptop. The end user experience is almost identical to Lubuntu (because it is also based on LXQt). Since both distros are Debian-based, and Canonical did not made radical changes to Lubuntu’s underlying Ubuntu OS, not only the look is almost the same, but also the feel if you are an experienced user and do work on the command line. Well…except for snaps.

I have two more remarks to make:

1. I appreciate the Lubuntu team for their work. I also appreciate the SparkyLinux team for their work. However, the Lubuntu website is add free, while the SparkyLinux website (forums, blog, etc.) is bloated with adds (extremely annoying);
2. After at least fourthousand years of high civilisation humanity should really focus on cooperation, not reinventing the wheel every 5, 6 years or so. Both Lubuntu and SparkyLinux are very marginal brands. I dare say extremely marginal. Join forces. Why not make Lubuntu the reference implementation of LXQt: “We’ll do the dirty work (i.e. the graphical layer), and you do the packaging on top of whatever OS”. Some analogy to the merger of the LXDE and Razor-Qt teams came into my mind.

[guiverc]

I can’t speak about SparkyLinux, but will say Debian GNU/Linux bookworm (or testing) is using the LXQt of Lubuntu 21.04 which is EOL (two releases ago), and I suspect that’s the LXQt you maybe using in Sparky.

@Fritz

After at least fourthousand years of high civilisation humanity should really focus on cooperation, not reinventing the wheel every 5, 6 years or so…

It’s some Lubuntu members that are currently involved upstream in pushing the LXQt 1.1 available for some time to Lubuntu kinetic or via backports to existing Lubuntu jammy, or 22.04 users, to Debian sid (you’ll see parts of currently in experimental) so we’re [Lubuntu] back in sync with Debian.

The Debian intention from Simon/@tsimonq2 to Debian/LXQt highlights this

I intend on updating the entire LXQt stack to the latest version on June 30, 2022 (this is when I plan on uploading to Sid).

The entire stack builds, installs, and works in the Ubuntu development release. I would like to completely eliminate the vast majority of Ubuntu deltas.

Lubuntu & Debian are different distributions yes, but we do try and work together when we can, as that is work that benefits us both & reduces overall workload. (The LXQt release in Lubuntu 22.04 LTS had intended to be LXQt 1.0 from Debian, but they were unable to get it there & we ran out of time if you recall; thus were pushing LXQt 1.1 there ourselves)

 lxqt-about | 0.17.0-0ubuntu1 | jammy/universe   | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
 lxqt-about | 1.1.0-2         | kinetic/universe | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x

lxqt-about | 0.16.0-1      | stable             | source, amd64, arm64, armel, armhf, i386, mips64el, mipsel, ppc64el, s390x
lxqt-about | 0.16.0-1      | testing            | source, amd64, arm64, armel, armhf, i386, mips64el, mipsel, ppc64el, s390x
lxqt-about | 0.16.0-1      | unstable           | source, amd64, arm64, armel, armhf, i386, mips64el, mipsel, ppc64el, s390x
lxqt-about | 0.16.0-1      | unstable-debug     | source
lxqt-about | 1.1.0-2       | experimental       | source, amd64, arm64, armel, armhf, i386, mips64el, mipsel, ppc64el, s390x
lxqt-about | 1.1.0-2       | experimental-debug | source

[Fritz]

I did not know you folks were actively involved in pushing the latest LXQt to other distro’s as well.
A perfect example of what I was referring too. Good to know that Lubuntu admires to be leading. Keep up the good work. Appreciated!

[guiverc]

Paste from @Rosika2

Hi Chris,

unfortunately the thread was closed before I could reply.
Therefore I send what I otherwise would´ve posted as a message to you.

Thanks for understanding. Also: thanks a lot for your help.

…

Hi all,

thanks again for your comments.

@axclassic:

Thanks for the link.

@axclassic

I have six 22.04 Lubuntu machines throughout my house and it worked with all of them.

Well, that´s quite something. Thanks for letting us know.

@guiverc:

@guiverc

Did you get [sufficient] answers to this?

Yes, thanks a lot. I marked your initial post (post #2) as the solution.

@guiverc

I don’t recall any issues without snapd, but that was a focal install and not jammy, and past isn’t always a great indicator for what will occur in the future

Quite. I´ll have to try for myself.

@guiverc

I don’t see Lubuntu as being any different in this regard to other Ubuntu flavors

Yes, I also looked around a bit and other official derivatives come with snapd enabled by default, too. You´re perfectly right.

@guiverc

Lubuntu & Debian are different distributions yes, but we do try and work together when we can

I didn´t know that. Well, it sounds promising. Really great.
Thanks for all the info.

@Fritz:

@Fritz

a good alternative to Lubuntu is SparkyLinux.

Thanks for the suggestion. I´ve heard of SparkyLinux but never got around to looking into it.
I´ll do it now.

BTW: I was also considering LinuxLite.
Still, the step away from Lubuntu wouldn´t be light-heartedly taken by me.

Thanks to all of you.

Many greetings from Rosika