this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2024
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Out of curiosity why do you not want snaps? I consider myself a beginner with Linux and would love to know what makes you not want to use them.
Performance issues/bloated disk usage and their forced use within Ubuntu.
The performance issues come from the fact that they run via virtualization. Similar to running a game on an emulator. This helps with compatibility, ie being able to run a Snap on an ARM computer when the native version isn't available, but again, performance can take a hit.
Bloated disk usage is a result of each Snap including all dependancies with the base package. For example, if two Snaps rely on the same font, you get two copies of that font. If two native packages rely on the same font, you get one copy, and they share.
The forced usage literally boils down to this; on Ubuntu, typing "apt install example-package" actually runs the command "snap install example-package" (Edit: I should note this isn't the case with all packages, but there are some pretty high profile ones on the list, ie Thunderbird). Canonical A; isn't up front about this, therefor leading users into believing they are getting native packages when this isn't the case, and B; make it frustratingly difficult to disable this behaviour and get only native packages
IMO if a company creates a product and then feels the need to force and trick their users into adopting it, that alone is enough to discourage me from ever choosing it over the alternatives.
I don't have personal experience with them, but I keep hearing they're very slow to start.
And I dislike them on principle, because Canonical tries to push snaps as the main distro-agnostic way of installing software, but they are hard-coded to only work with Canonical's servers. It reminds me of the embrace-extend-extinguish strategy of Microsoft.
I'm far from an enjoyer of snaps BUT snaps do support other custom stores and aren't tied to the snap store, contrary to popular belief.
Also, the fix for making snap startup times has been developed and released but most existing snaps haven't patched their snaps to support it (last I heard, the only notable exception (aka the only known snap to have good startup times) is the Firefox snap).
From what I read they only support one single snap store though, so if you don't use the Canonical store, you lose access to all the third party software that's actually the point of snaps.
Snap does theoretically support other stores, but the code for the canonical store is proprietary so you’d have to reverse engineer a snap store and hope that canonical doesn’t break it with an update. Also apart from Ubuntu nobody uses snaps so why would anyone make a snap store? Btw they have improved snaps with faster start times and such, so they aren’t that much slower than packages or flatpak.
Snaps aren't that slow anymore. They closed the gap a couple of months ago. (I still dislike snaps and ubuntu for pushing them)