I see people hate snap packaging and removing it if their OS support it. Is it because it’s NOT fully open-source or just due to how the technology works?
Update: fixed typos
There are philosophical and technical reasons to not like snaps
Technical
- Slow startup time
- Makes lsblk look really ugly
- For awhile users didn’t have a lot of control over when things updated
- Not designed to work with third party repos by default
- Requires apparmor so it doesn’t work well on selinux distros.
Philosophical
- Backend is proprietary and controller by a single company
- Has made the same amount of effort as flatpak to work on distros that aren’t Ubuntu
- Some people just don’t like Ubuntu
- Canonical is pushing it too aggressively, removing the freedom of choice.
I remember when the snap version of calculator took like 12 seconds to launch and Canonical were like “yeah but what’s the big deal?”.
It basically turns your super fast Linux into feeling like a 10 year old windows machine.
I hear they have improved performance now though but there are many other reasons why snap suck.
I hear they have improved performance now though
It’s still not great. Better, but still slow enough to make you question whether you’ve actually launched the app or not.
Short answer: Canonical is strong arming Ubuntu flavors into removing support for alternatives to snap (that run better and do the same thing). These types of decisions are generally worse for the overall Linux community.
Right now, a part of the Linux and Open Source communities are distancing themselves from corporate-sponsored projects given issues we’ve recently seen with RedHat’s CentOS and Canonical’s decisions with Snap and LXD
On a less philosophical note, I find it immensely annoying how Snap creates mounts for its apps bc of how it clutters up disk management tools
At best it works more or less the same as an ordinary package. It only gets worse from there.
Several times I’ve been stuck on a broken version of Discord because on the server side they force an update to the new client, and the new client has not been packaged as a Snap yet.
Getting native hosts to work in Firefox is possible, but a giant pain in the butt.
Basically anything that needs filesystem access is unreasonably troublesome. I gave up on getting Snaps to work with my external drives.
There is simply no scenario where I think “wow, I sure am glad this was packaged as a Snap!” There have been many scenarios where I thought “god dammit why is this a Snap?!”
Here’s my answer to this same question from an old thread on Reddit:
My Ubuntu system always reserved a whopping 20% of my 32GB ram for no reason and I never bothered to know why. Later I uninstalled snapd because of boot time issues and guess what happened? Only 1.5 GB used after a fresh boot.
I had like 4 different JetBrains IDEs installed via snap with each totalling around 2GB of disk space. While removing snapd I discovered it kept back 2-3 previous versions of every package on your disk.
Uninstalling this bloat was the best thing I did to my ubuntu system. It was suddenly light as a feather and way more responsive like I just did a fresh system install.
Some time later I was installing something from apt and Ubuntu tried to install it from snap, thus sneakily installing snapd in the process. Looking for a solution, I felt like I was looking up how to disable Windows updates or some other shit.
I had a moment of clarity and wondered why the fuck did I have to put up with this kinda bullshit on Linux. I wiped that drive clean and switched to Fedora.
I wiped that drive clean and switched to Fedora.
I might need to switch over as well, but I really don’t like rpm (or whatever that’s called on fedora, zypper or something? or was that suse?). I’ve been a Debian user since woody was a new thing and then at some point I gradually moved to ubuntu due to better desktop experience and more up to date packages (back then Debian stable really wasn’t anywhere close of bleeding edge) and PPA support was great for my needs. Now I have ubuntu installations which have gone trough upgrades for years and installations I have doesn’t seem to work like I want them to. Some of the issues will most likely stay (as RMS said, nvidia rapes babies or something like that) but in general I don’t like my browser, signal client and whatnot to notify me that I need to shut them down NOW since they’ll upgrade at some point in next 3-6 months. Simple apt dist-upgrade isn’t enough anymore and the systems require more and more TLC than I’m willing to give to them. Snapd is at least related to the issues I have 8 times out of 10.
Ubuntu just doesn’t have the feel it used to and it’s getting annoying enough that the simpler way would be just to reinstall everything and switch to something else, even if it takes some time and effort to migrate 5+ year old installations to new system.
Maybe LM:DE (Linux Mint: Debian Edition)? Obscure software can be a pain to install for the usual reason, but otherwise I’m finding this to be a great distro. Second choice is Solus, but that’s even worse when it comes to software.
Linux Mint’s criticism of snap. Mint is based on Ubuntu.
