Snap is TERRIBLE for non-technical people. Imagine installing an image editor via Snap, and then the default sandboxing making it unable to access the images on your media drive. No errors, it just silently fails.
This has been a problem I’ve dealt with on nearly every single Snap I’ve installed. If you’re a file editor, you must let me edit my damn files!
I often hear things like this, but I never encounter them myself.
I've run every single version of Ubuntu ever released. Work machines stay on LTSes, testbeds run interim versions.
After the 22.04 release, I carefully de-snapped my work laptop, using `deb-get` to install native packages of everything. Worked a treat, took less disk space, things started a tiny bit faster.
Then I enabled Ubuntu Pro and it force-reinstalled snapd. It's fair enough to have it as a dependency: it's a standard component. I was very annoyed, though.
But when I upgraded to 24.04, a lot of things broke. I had to spend ages re-enabling repositories, getting new keys, changing version strings in stuff under `/etc/apt/sources.list.d` and so on. It's a PITA.
So I have performed a volte face. I removed all my `deb-get` packages, and reinstalled the snap versions. All my comms and messaging apps, music and media players, and so on.
It's much easier. No extra repos. I experimentally took one laptop from 24.04 to 24.10 to 25.04 to 25.10 and yesterday to 26.04. All my apps stay in place. Nothing broke. No custom repos. No changes needed to any config file. It just works.
I've been using Linux for 30 years, starting on Slackware and moving to Red Hat and Caldera and SUSE via lots of others. But I'm old and grumpy and I want stuff to work without fiddling. I want low maintenance. Snap is low maintenance. My messaging apps can download stuff into my Downloads folder, open attachments from Documents, and so on.
I run native packages of my own browsers (Waterfox and Chrome) and AppImages of Panwriter and Logseq, and I have none of these difficulties.
Life is easier if you don't fight the OS and the vendor.
And Ubuntu is still easier and less hassle than Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch, or any of the other big names.
XCode is one of the worst pieces of software in history. Imagine writing a code editor that couldn’t keep its syntax highlighting from crashing for multiple years.
Each has their trade offs. AWS absolutely has a high premium but Hetzner has some quirks.
Recently we had several of our VMs offline because they apparently have these large volume storage pools they were upgrading and suddenly disks died in two large pools. It took them 3 days to resolve.
Hetzner has no integrated option to backup volumes and its roll your own :/ You also can't control volume distribution on their storage nodes for redundancy.
I don't think it's fair to call AWS a scam. It's complicated and powerful and it charges a lot for many services compared to a DIY approach. But you can see the prices transparently on its site, it provides a free tier to try most services out, it is fairly good about long term support for services and how it handles forced upgrades when they become necessary, and generally it has an OK reputation for customer support even if something unexpected and very bad happens. You're certainly paying a price for the convenience and the brand but I don't think that's a scam if you're making an informed choice. If you want to save money then you can replace RDS with Postgres running on VMs but the trade off is then you have to manage your database infrastructure yourself.
On top of lambda and CF (if I remember correctly) I got the WAF and something else slapped on silently. Sorry, don't remember the details. It was basically a tiny tiny "project", entirely within the free tier -- until it wasn't because non-free components have been added to it.
That’s like saying Mercedes is a scam because you’re fine with a Honda Civic. It’s a totally legitimate preference but not being in the target market doesn’t make something a scam.
AWS ain't no Mercedes. Mercedes feels premium and isn't full of bugs.
AWS and Azure a charging an arm and a leg, but the offered quality is mostly perceived. Most of the bits and bobs they charge for are not providing much value for a vast majority of businesses. I won't even go over the complete lack of ergonomics with their portals.
I see you have strong emotions about this but really my point was simply that AWS customers are paying for things they value which you do not. It’s fine for you not to share their priorities but any time people are paying billions of dollars for something in a competitive market, it’s a mistake to say they’re all fools or being fooled.
I see you've never actually owned or worked on a German car, especially in relation to even modest Japanese models. Maybe they were a little nicer inside in the 80s and maybe 90s, but "German car" and frankly "European make" is basically synonymous with "big expensive pile of shit that's an expensive pain in the ass when things start falling apart (which they seem to with increasing rapidity)." It's like the disease that plagued British cars for the longest time got contaminated with the German propensity to build overly complex monstrosities.
I've worked on many German cars and the amount of bullshit repairs (ie. stuff breaking because of obviously poor engineering) I had to do on them was just way lower than on Ford/Chevrolet cars that are supposedly less over-engineered. French cars, on the other hand, are somehow even worse.
No, they just don't know what value AWS provides. And honestly you'll never know until you roll out your own Dedicated servers and later you'll wonder why you never did it sooner.
Cloud used to be marketed for scalability. "Netflix can scale up when people are watching, and scale down at night".
Then the blogosphere and astroturfing got everyone else on board. How can $5 on amazon get you less than what you got from almost any VPS (VDS) provider 10 years ago?
An entirely different form of research could be done by sending large quantities of normal people into space. Astronauts are such a small sample size (and so thoroughly vetted) that you get a different statistical view.
The price at the pump affects not only a voter's commuter car, but also every truck that delivers goods across the US. This may have a much larger knock-on effect.
OTOH the US is the largest oil producer in the world [1]. Theoretically the US could keep domestic prices in check, but that would require rather drastic administrative pressure, likely only legal at wartime.
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