Experimental flag for hiding ~/snap

snapd
41

@miguelpires

I tried the option to move ~/snap to ~/.snap and it worked! I had to:

  1. Uninstall all snap apps, including the built-in ones
  2. Manually move some of the leftover files to ~/.snap
  3. Configure experimental.hidden-snap-folder
  4. Reinstall my snap apps

… but it’s working! That indicates that we’re not too far away from being able to making the default be ~/.snap.

However I almost laughed out loud when I read that you all are planning on standardizing a ~/Snap folder for “user facing snap data” (whatever that is). You’ve gone through the hard work of addressing the frequent complaint about forcing non-hidden snap folders on the user by implementing experimental.hidden-snap-folder, then promptly thrown it all away again with ~/Snap.

Please, just store whatever it was you wanted to store in ~/Snap inside ~/.snaphome or ~/.snap/home or something, and have snap regenerate a convenience symlink (if you must) to ~/Snap. Then add a experimental.no-create-snap-home-symlink configuration option, so that those who care, can delete ~/Snap and never see it again.

Also, consider the case-insensitive filesystem implications of standardizing a ~/Snap directory that has a different purpose from ~/snap. While using a case-insensitive filesystem with Linux is very uncommon, I think this may be unwise anwyay.

1 Like
42

Any reason why this isn’t default yet?

43

@miguelpires @pedronis hi! i have been tracking this for a while now and it has been ~3 years since this experimental hidden flag has been released. In my use over these 3 years, it has been excellent and stable to use via this hidden flag and would be insightful to see why this has not been made it to stable yet. i would be interested if i can contribute with tests in anyway.

1 Like