Linux Mint 20. Slimjet, goodbye?

[aig.rus.]

Monthly News – May 2020
Snap

We also heard your queries on the topic of snapd. This is a topic which is important to us and we already explained our position last year:

• […] as you install APT updates, Snap becomes a requirement for you to continue to use Chromium and installs itself behind your back. This breaks one of the major worries many people had when Snap was announced and a promise from its developers that it would never replace APT.</FONT>
  
  A self-installing Snap Store which overwrites part of our APT package base is a complete NO NO. It’s something we have to stop and it could mean the end of Chromium updates and access to the snap store in Linux Mint.

A year later, in the Ubuntu 20.04 package base, the Chromium package is indeed empty and acting, without your consent, as a backdoor by connecting your computer to the Ubuntu Store. Applications in this store cannot be patched, or pinned. You can’t audit them, hold them, modify them or even point snap to a different store. You’ve as much empowerment with this as if you were using proprietary software, i.e. none. This is in effect similar to a commercial proprietary solution, but with two major differences: It runs as root, and it installs itself without asking you.

First, I’m happy to confirm that Linux Mint 20, like previous Mint releases will not ship with any snaps or snapd installed. Second, to address this situation we’ll do exactly what we said we would:

In Linux Mint 20, Chromium won’t be an empty package which installs snapd behind your back. It will be an empty package which tells you why it’s empty and tells you where to look to get Chromium yourself.
In Linux Mint 20, APT will forbid snapd from getting installed.
You’ll still be able to install it yourself and we’ll document this in the release notes, but by default APT won’t allow repository packages from doing this on your behalf.
https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3906

[oftentired]

Does Slimjet make use of this SNAP employed by Chromium? And, if so, can it be avoided by manual updates? And while this is issue for the Linux Mint team, is it as important to the average Linux user?

[aig.rus.]

oops. this is a problem for the Linux mint (Ubuntu) team.