Focal Testing of Kubuntu 20.04 LTS

[Sothis6881]

Just installed today in Virtualbox, and I'm quite impressed! Should be an excellent release.

[NoWorries]

It is now 3 months to the release of Focal.

I am continuing to find this distribution very stable and have no hesitation to use it as my production system.

I have not experienced the problems reported above by Teunis as I do not use radio on my desktop. I also use Gimp for my photo editing rather than Showfoto. I have not had any problems with Gwenview which is at version 4.19.12.1-0 and I have not installed any add-ons for it.

My only outstanding annoyance is with Dolphin as it does not show "Removable Devices" when launched. I have to right mouse click in the left panel "Places" and select "Show Hidden Places" each time I launch Dolphin.

With my Pre-release updates selected and with additional repositories for the latest kernel and plasma, I get:

	4 Months to go	3 Months to go
KDE Plasma Version	5.17.4	5.17.90
KDE Frameworks Version	5.65.0	5.66.0
QT Version	5.12.5	5.12.5
Kernel Version	5.4.0-9-generic	5.4.0-12-generic

Focal LTS continues to advance on all major fronts with the exception of the QT Version. Other applications continue to be updated and I am delighted with the progress being made. All involved in the progress are doing a commendable job at producing a very stable system and are to be congratulated.

[GreyGeek]

Discovery, snap and apt

This morning I did my usual "sudo apt update" and "sudo apt full-upgrade" and 41 apps downloaded and installed, libwine(i386) and wine32(i386) were held back.

I was curious because in a previous update those two files broke the installation of two of my installed EXE applications so I rolled back to a previous snapshot pair and then used apt-mark to hold those two applications. Redoing the update without those two apps proceeded normally and my two EXE's ran without problems. I continued to do updates and upgrades for several days without problems. Three days ago I removed the holds and did an update & full-upgrade. Everything installed without problems, including the wine apps, and my two Windows programs ran without problems.

Today I got a notice of 41 updates. I opened a Konsole and ran update & full-upgrade and noticed that two programs were being withheld, libwine and wine2. I checked and they were not being held on my system. The rest installed without problems. My WIndows programs continued to work without problems.

So, I decided to see what Discover would do. It said 26 applications were ready to update. I let discover update them and after it was finished it, too, reported that the two wine files were being held back. Muon reports a total of 70 applications were updated or installed.

Most of the ones that Discover updated or installed appear to be coming from snap, and it appears to me that apt and snap are not coordinating their sources.list. Because of Discover's poor performance in the 16.04 and 18.04 releases I uninstalled it. I also uninstalled snap because I didn't use it and snapd was consuming CPU cycles.

My question is: What possible damage might I do in Focal by uninstalling both snap and Discover?

[Don B. Cilly]

IMHO... purge snapd before it does damage.
Discover you can leave and just ignore.

[GreyGeek]

IMHO... purge snapd before it does damage.
Discover you can leave and just ignore.

Even though I hadn't given it much thought before, and just deleted snap and Discover, the differences between a Discover update and an Apt update made me wonder if removing snap and/or Discover would break Focal, or prevent it from being all that it can be.

I found this msg, written by a former snap developer: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comm...f_snap_vs_apt/

Here are the technical facts I wanted to know:
https://snapcraft.io/blog/a-technica...snaps-and-debs

Based on the fact that snap packages are uncompressed and mounted as loopback device which require squashfs and snapd overhead, whereas AppImages do not, I am going to uninstall snap and Discover, as I alway have in the past.

[GreyGeek]

I deleted snapd, which had the side-effect of deleting chromium-browser.
Now, I wanted to install JUST the chromium-browser so I tried:

sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends chromium-browser

It failed.

I was presented with a message to install both both, or neither. I chose "n" and went looking for a deb package of Chromium-browser that I could download and install by itself.

To install that package from google would require I install the source, and bunch of additional dev tools, and compile it. I decided against that course and searched some more. I discovered two ppa projects but neither offered just the chromium-browser deb package without having to do a lot of hokus pokus stuff.

So, I reinstalled chromium-browser, which also pulled down and installed snapd.
BUT, I thought of using systemd to disable snapd:

sudo systemctl disable snapd.service
[sudo] password for jerry:
Removed /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/snapd.service.



Eureka!

As far as I know Muon doesn't play patti-cake with snapd so snapd is history on my machine.

[Don B. Cilly]

Here are all the not-so-technical facts I need to know about them.
(which seem to be "conveniently" ignored in both pages you linked to).

And which can be summarised as: Snaps are phriqqin 'orrible, is what they are

[GreyGeek]

After I masked snapd.service I got to wondering if there were any other snapd artifacts hanging around. So, I did

sudo systemctl list-units | grep snapd
and found snapd.seeded.service, snap-snapd-5754.mount and snapd.socket.

I disabled them:
sudo systemctl disable snapd.seeded.service
sudo systemctl disable snap-snapd-5754.mount
sudo systemctl disable snapd.socket

and redid the listing:
sudo systemctl list-units | grep snapd

and it returned nothing. I rebooted and did not find any snapd artifact in the units listing of systemctl.

My system is now truly free of snapd and discover.

[Don B. Cilly]

not@all:~$ sudo systemctl list-units | grep snapd
[sudo] password for not: 
not@all:~$

user@host says it all

[kubicle]

Quick tip. You do not need to "sudo" systemctl list-units (it'll work fine as a regular user, as do most systemctl commands...technically all of them since it uses policykit and knows when to ask for elevated privileges if necessary, but there is no harm in using sudo if you know it needs them). But for list-units, it's just "useless use of sudo™", technically you can sudo it just fine, but it's "best practice" to use sudo only when necessary than just out of habit.

[kubicle]

Great recipe GreyGeek, I will at some point probably reinstall and follow your lead to purge the system of Discover and snap.

You shouldn't need to manually disable/remove anything, simple "sudo apt --purge autoremove snapd" followed by a reboot should remove it completely.
("list-units" reports units that systemd has *in memory* [not what is installed on disk] the snap units will be gone after a reboot)

[GreyGeek]

You shouldn't need to manually disable/remove anything, simple "sudo apt --purge autoremove snapd" followed by a reboot should remove it completely.
("list-units" reports units that systemd has *in memory* [not what is installed on disk] the snap units will be gone after a reboot)

The side effect of uninstalling (or purging) snapd is that it takes the chromium-browser with it. As I wrote, the easiest thing for me to do was reinstall chromium-browser, which brought along snapd with it, even though I used the "--no-install-recommends" switch, and then used systemctl to disable it, and every other service with snapd in its name. The reboot cleared everything.

I read somewhere about not having to use sudo for user service settings but habit is a habit with me. Between it and DuckDuckGo that's about the sum total of my memory.

PS - Thanks for the reminder, Kubicle. When you post I'm reminded of the EF Hutton ad, "When EF Hutton speaks people listen". You're EF Hutton on the KFN.

[kubicle]

The side effect of uninstalling (or purging) snapd is that it takes the chromium-browser with it.

Really? chromium-browser package depends on snapd on *ubuntu 20.04? (that's madness, if that's the case I'd get chromium from another source) or chromium-browser was installed as a snap package and not as a deb?

EDIT: Looks like the chromium-browser apt package actually installs the snap version in later versions of *buntu (which explains why it would depend on snapd):
https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?k...romium-browser

So your chromium-browser should actually be a snap
https://snapcraft.io/blog/chromium-i...nap-transition

[WWDERW]

Really? chromium-browser package depends on snapd on *ubuntu 20.04? (that's madness, if that's the case I'd get chromium from another source) or chromium-browser was installed as a snap package and not as a deb?

I believe the chromium browser does come in as a snap versus as a deb package. At least when I tried it get it on 19.10, I do not know about 20.04, I didn't bother installing it since it came in as a snap. I would prefer an AppImage over a snap, even if it is a large AppImage.

[kubicle]

I believe the chromium browser does come in as a snap versus as a deb package. At least when I tried it get it on 19.10, I do not know about 20.04, I didn't bother installing it since it came in as a snap. I would prefer an AppImage over a snap, even if it is a large AppImage.

Thanks, I figured that one out already and edited my post (as I'm on neon I haven't been as much in touch with *buntu changes/development, but it is obviously already circling the drain)