This completely fails the “mom test” - my mother has no clue what this notification means and what to do about and it shows up all the time.
I agree. Everyone who sees these notifications has to google to find out what the heck they mean. Then, once there’s an update to a running snap available, the notifications start appearing about once an hour, with no apparent way to turn them off. This is a suboptimal user experience.
When there are udpates to regular packages, Ubuntu’s Software Updater pops up a dialog either once a day or once a week, user-configurable. The dialog has a button to start the update process.
Some ideas that immediately come to mind that would improve the user experience of the “Pending update of X snap” notifications:
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The notification should explain better what it’s all about.
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The notification should instead be a dialog that has buttons for taking action, like the Software Updater dialog does.
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One of the actions should be to pause the notifications for a set time, like a number of hours or days.
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Another action should be starting the update process for those snaps that need updating, without requiring the user to go to the command line.
As an aside, as far as I understand, the action that currently has to be taken to update snaps is commanding “sudo snap refresh” on the command line. When I give that command while there’s a snap to be updated, but it’s running, it yields this misleading output: “All snaps up to date.” Only after I kill the snap that has an update and give that command again does it start updating the snap. Very puzzling to the naive user who thinks that the output “All snaps up to date” means that all snaps are, indeed, up-to-date.
Also, I just now noticed that there’s an application called “Snap Store” that allows one to update snaps using the GUI. However, when I tried to update the snap that has an update pending, I got an error similar to the one user kimse posted above, in message #96. This is not great either — why isn’t there an option for the user to shut down the running snap so that the Snap Store can update it?
In other words, I agree with user kimse’s suggestions in message #99.