Canonical rears it's ugly head and forces chromium and snapd

[oshunluvr]

Tried to update this morning. Got a fairly shocking message that I was being forced to "upgrade" chromium and that snap would be (re) installed with no exit option, just a YES button.

Sounds like Canonical has taken a page from the Microsoft playbook and is now going to jam snapd down our throats. I broke the install sequence but after a half-hour I basically had to allow the "upgrade" and snap to be re-installed. Which I immediately purged again and went looking for other options before I just rolled back to this morning's snapshot.

A few minutes searching the web (using Firefox) revealed that System76 is maintaining chromium without snaps. So I enabled the System76 ppa, installed chromium, and disabled the system 76 ppa again to prevent unintended upgrades to other packages and it's working well. Seems to be behind the latest release, but I can live with that for now. Here's the installed version:

Version 83.0.4103.116 (Developer Build) built on Debian bullseye/sid, running on Debian bullseye/sid (64-bit)

I guess I have to get serious about a new browser AND a new distro if this is what I can expect going forward. I've been using Kubuntu/KDEneon sive 2009. Time for a change I guess.

[oshunluvr]

Oh, If you want Chromium this way, here's how to enable the System76 (PopOS) ppa:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:system76/pop
sudo apt update
sudo apt install chromium

After chromium is installed, edit /etc/apt/sources.d/system76-ubuntu-pop-focal.list and remark out the deb line.

[GreyGeek]

Give WaterFox a try. I'm loving it!

EDIT: I decided to update and saw 103 packages waiting. None were related to snapd or chromium. The update proceeded without any reinstall of either.

Perhaps your system wasn't fully cleaned of snapd?
After I did a purge of snapd I also removed systemd's null pointers to snapd, and remove all mount points, sockets and subdirectories related to snapd.

[oshunluvr]

Yea, IDK why this happened but it caused a bunch of other issues too like not being able to read DVDs all of a sudden.

I had purged and disabled snaps and snapd a long time ago. Maybe the dist-upgrade re-enabled something.

I had tried out Brave awhile back but didn't commit because I like the sync capabilities of chromium. Well, Brave fixed their sync issues so I went back to Brave. Hopefully, it'll stay good for awhile.

[GreyGeek]

Electronic gremlins appear when one least expects them!

But I agree with you. I'd hate to leave Kubuntu after 11 years but I'd do it in a heartbeat if Canonical mimics Microsoft.
I'd find a distro based on dpk and featuring KDE. KaOS 2020.7, for example. Or, perhaps openSUSE or PCLINUXOS (but I dislike the RPM package manager because of past experience (obviously more than 11 years ago but things could be better now).

[jglen490]

john@john-Desktop:~$ sudo find / -iname snap
john@john-Desktop:~$ sudo find / -iname snapd
john@john-Desktop:~$

Just lucky, I guess.

john@john-Desktop:~$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS
Release:        20.04
Codename:       focal

[oshunluvr]

I ended up reverting to the morning's snapshot, removed chromium (non-snap) so the update wouldn't repeat itself, updated, and I think I'm OK.

However, something happened that I thought was the fault of the Canonical shenanigans, but it continues after reverting.

All day the last several days I've been copying a stack of DVDs to the hard drive using dd. All of a sudden today I get an I/O error from dd. To make it even more odd, if I launch VLC and start the DVD, dd can read it. IDK if the drive itself is at fault or what. It has been behaving strangely.

[MoonRise]

Maybe you do have some gremlins there!