The other day I noticed that someone is developing a web editor for Circuitpython (independent of the web-based editor intended mainly for boards that speak WiFi) and thought it would be worth a try, especially because it would mean I might be able to retire the four ancient linux laptops I maintain for my students to do the things they can’t do with chromebooks (Which are also horrible, but in other ways.)

Of course, there’s no transparent shim to support USB access from Firefox, so I installed Chromium on my Ubuntu box. That means I automatically installed the Snap version, because the deb and Appimage versions have been forcibly deprecated. It was only after a couple hours of wondering why the web editor refused to open a serial connection to my Circuitpython boards (it could read and write files just fine, and the version of Circuitpython apparently didn’t matter) that I hunted down a reference noting that Chromium couldn’t do Webserial because Snap doesn’t support plugging in or unplugging USB devices. I wish I’d known that before trying to adjust udev rules and site security settings and a bunch of other things that might have been the cause if USB serial wasn’t simply turned off regardless of what the browser and the OS thought about it.

Further down the rathole I learned that I might be able to turn Webserial on if I changed to the unstable bleeding-edge version of Snap, enabled the experimental hot-plug feature (it seems to have been in experimental status for about 3 years), and downloaded a new snap for Chromium that acknowledged the danger of access to the hardware.

Or I could nip over the the Chromium site, download an Appimage (which fired up several seconds faster) and go my merry way. I know that eventually this will bite me with updates, but I’m kinda OK with manually updating stuff ever since an automatic change of python version broke about half the software I was using.

Snaps are supposed to be no muss, no fuss. But in this case the non-snap version is way simpler, and the snap version is all about the arcane incantations.