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
I don’t know enough to dislike snaps, I’m just spiteful enough to dislike cannonical trying to force me to use them
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 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.
Examining my disk partitions with df is ruined now. Every snap gets its own virtual disk.
Just create an alias that filters loop devices. I mean, if this is your only problem with snap, you can fix it in a second. But I’m betting you have other problems with it.
Perhaps it’s been fixed since, but a this type of thing was the main issue with snaps to me:
“Why can’t the program see the printer? Ubuntu can see the printer”
“Why can’t I save to this USB pen? It can’t even see it”
“These two programs are meant to work together, but they can’t see each other”
“I can’t open my project from my external drive”
“It won’t let me import the photos from my camera. It can’t see the camera”
Would have been less of an issue if they had an android-style permissions pop-up with each incident, but snaps just left you silently failing.
This was my experience too. Ubuntu asks if I want to install the docker snap, I say sure. I then try to use docker and it’s completely unable to do what I need. I then need to figure out how to uninstall the snap and then install docker normally.
I tried a few snaps, but everytime they were a pain in the ass and I regretted it. Now I avoid them at all costs
Because I can’t dismiss the Firefox update notification, no matter how many times I update it.
I’ve had to reboot every time.
Which, way to go you’ve reimplemented windows xp era updates.
Stop the app and run “snap refresh” and it should update anything that’s queued
yes, I did kill the process and update the image though snap.
this did nothing to remove the update notification that cannot be dismissed without rebooting.
Oh, weird. The notification itself disappeared for me when I click it (KDE)
maybe they fixed it, I switched to Debian over a year ago.
its a scam.
there was this jerk working as an intern at red hat. lennart. he made the decision to break the linux dogma: do one thing and do it good. systemd was born. red hat drools. an important step towarda ending open-ness. later snaps. later closing red hat stream. profit.
if you use systemd or snaps you could just fast forward and use apple.
