Recently, Dutch developer Remy van Elst complained about the problems caused by snap automatic updates through his blog, and decided to delete snap and chose to abandon Ubuntu.

After upgrading to Ubuntu 20.04, Remy installed CLion via snap, because it is obviously more convenient than downloading and installing manually. But just last weekend, he discovered that CLion was automatically updated. In fact, when he noticed the update, the program process had been terminated due to an error caused by the update.

During the automatic update process, several key plugins were broken. Remy said that it was not just the plug-in in the screenshot that had a problem, the plug-in used to cross-compile to ARM also became a major problem.

To him, it is even worse that Ubuntu cannot disable snap updates, which is “even worse than Windows.” Three years ago, a user raised this issue in the Snap official forum. The following discussion continued until the end of June this year, but the Snap official never gave a solution.

Some users posted this blog post on forums such as reddit and Hacker news. Many people suggested that you can roll back to the previous version through snap revert clion, but in Remy’s view, this kind of symptomatic treatment is meaningless. . He believes that the user’s control over the software package is more important.

In the end, Remy chose the ultimate solution: completely delete the snap. He mentioned that he might install Linux Mint instead of Ubuntu in the future, because Linux Mint recently disabled snap and allowed users to configure updates.