Why Are Ubuntu Linux PPA So Hated?

Over the years there has been a lot of criticism about Ubuntu PPA but why exactly don't people like them and why did Canonical start pushing users over to snaps instead.

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[BrodieRobertson]

YouTube thinks I'm playing a game in this video

[ransan]

7:38 Brodie giving me a mini heart attack by making me think my hardware is breaking.

[FirstnameLastname-wedh]

You can manage package and dependency versions inside of PPA's with pin package priority. As an example you can deprioritize packages from a PPA meaning any package from the PPA that's availailable in the main repositories won't be overwriten by the PPA version. This will prevent almost all issues related to PPA dependcies breaking the entire system.

[earendil]

Things might get better. Canonical have started to work on improving the PPA system. For 23.10, this is only a new GPG key mechanism which should be more secure and where removing the repository automatically remove the corresponding GPG key. But this means that Canonical is reworking on it.

[billeterk]

I think last time I looked at a PPA I ended up deciding gnu stow was a better option.

[Spencer-wcew]

Imagine if every package you want from the aur required you edit some config file before you could install it. And uninstalling the program doesn't revert that change. Also the official repository has tons of packages years out of date, so you have to do this process frequently.
That's why I found PPAs very frustrating when using Mint. It added too many steps to install stuff. And you'd be slowly bloating your config with all those PPAs.
And there are multiple ways of adding a PPA to your config, making the process more confusing to understand to new comers. That also makes it difficult to find how to remove PPAs at times.

[mini_bomba]

One of the issues with PPAs that I can remember is that the release upgrade process (where you upgrade from one version of ubuntu to another) disables all your PPAs...
Which can be awkward if the packages you had from PPAs are still missing or outdated in the official repos.

Well maybe it's just me, but I like having up-to-date software, even on my servers, and I don't like having to spend a whole day carefully going through a release upgrade, even if it's once or twice a year, so I just get stuck on whatever the current LTS release is. I'd much more prefer having to run each update manually a few times a month and have the latest packages.
The only reason I use ubuntu on cloud servers is that it's pretty much always an option in those cloud service providers, and arch is not. Yeah, I'm considering using arch on my servers.
There are two packages I absolutely love using, whose official packages on 22.04 also happen to be absolutely ancient - podman and neovim. I managed to work around the podman issue with their kubic repos... But getting a recent-enough version of neovim that could run my favourite configs was too frustrating.

[LaughingOrange]

I think PPAs broke my Ubuntu back in the day, but I was an inexperienced user so it's entirely possible I did something else to break it too. They do however feel really weird to use.

[FagnerLuan]

They were really important in the past, PPAs simply "do the job", but thankfully we have Flatpaks/Snaps nowadays, a lot less issue.

I avoid every third party repositories on every distro I put my hand, no AUR, no COPR, no OBS (OpenSUSE Build Service), it just create another layer to have issues. On OpenSUSE you at least can set the priority of the repository, which is a pretty nice feature, but still can create issues.

And maybe I'm missing something, but I think that you can't install old PPA on newer Ubuntu, the PPA should correspond the correct release.

[schemage]

Honestly when I was a new user, the hardest thing about PPA's was adding PPA's to your system. Once that was done, it was a peace of cake! Snaps and Flatpaks kinda take out that first step which is great but PPA's are fine. Just fine!

[yeahaddigirl]

For those of us trying to run real life business, it's either use PPAs or build from source every time, and usually in containers. Container build times are already long and complicated, building from source is often not a great idea for productivity.

[ZanaGBYT]

Simply put, you'll find that the weird piece of software you want to install is only available as a PPA for a release of ubuntu 4 years ago, and has never been updated since. Or, in the other hand, someone just made a PPA and will never update it ever again. Come upgrading to a point number release or to a full new release of ubuntu and all hell breaks loose. Sure, you can rebuild your package cache and eliminate the problem repo. and that's a doable task if you just installed one package from a weird repo. But the work grows exponentially the more PPA's you add. That last bit is anectodal and probably not true beyond my specific screw-up all those years back. But honestly? that was good enough reason to avoid PPAs entirely.

[ClayWeber]

adding a dead PPA will throw an error when updating. It won't install any software from that repo. it also prevents apt from updating anything until it is fixed, with the usual cryptic error messages.

[gobleno]

I never had any problems with PPA's since about Ubuntu 16, but I only used PPA's from trusted sources like Spotify, Docker, NodeSources. They just make it really easy to install and update third party software. I would never add a PPA without checking if it was compatible with my OS though.

[lesto]

my experience: adding external PPA will inevitably break the system, if not in normal update, at the next full system upgrade.
Also about the AUR, it is also extremely easy to orphan and adopt

[orbatos]

Snap is not a replacement for PPAs, it's an attempt to secure a walled garden owned by Canonical.

PPAs are for less formal repo access for custom/newer/checkpointed versions of a package. Snaps just don't cover this use case.

Examples are easy to find, prototype driver support, etc. This is *not* to say they are well managed, but PPAs have a much worse reputation than warranted and most end users don't even know they exist.

[ClayWeber]

I haven't had issues with PPAs in many years, though I do at least casually look at the pages for them, to see who and how often they are updated, etc. Mainly for system level things like Mesa. PPAs mainly break upgrades when they have software that is fresher than what is in the new release. Logical, but of course hard for regular users or newbies to know what to look for. I used to maintain a PPA for KMyMoney back in the day. Packaging IS hard, and I was bad it it often enough. I eventually stopped, as the dependencies for the dependencies of the dependencies became too much to keep up with, for previous *buntu releases. Snap/Flatpaks/Appimages are better imo in many cases for those odd things you need to have the utmost recency with. But really, to the end user, how is this any different from old or poorly maintained COPR or OBS repos? Much of it is of course the usual Ubuntu hate, with a lot of help from Ubuntu themselves.

[gljames]

There are so many applications that should ship as a flatpak rather than a PPA

[Your_Degenerate]

I don't think I ever hated PPAs but I had a couple of times when updating/upgrading my system that it wouldn't go through till I removed the PPA's returning an error.

[Alkaris]

PPA's lead to dependency hell issues, and always outdated, because when someone is distributing software bundle of their own in a PPA it creates conflicts between packages that are installed, because one PPA is heavily outdated, while the other is more updated, so the new ones replaces the old ones, but then some other application refuses to work because they won't work with the new packages that was installed by the newer version. It becomes a huge issue where you just want to update a single software application that you use, but it's got to remove and update other stuff at the same time, while in the process breaking other applications in the process.