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Comment by awelkie | Hacker News Reader

Is that the first time per installation, or the first time per boot?

I just tried starting the gnome-characters app, which I have installed via snap and via apt. The snap-installed app boots in around 6 seconds after restarting my machine, and then in about 3 seconds afterwards (I'm just counting the seconds in my head). By contrast, the apt-installed app boots well under a second.

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My god, doesn't that amount of time bother anyone? 3 whole seconds is an eternity on modern hardware.

It probably bothers some people but it does not bother me. I'm on relatively slow hardware. I use a (second?) gen i5, but without an SSD and without a GPU. My laptop is fine for programming, even gaming (CS:GO, CS:S both work! CS:GO admittedly on 1080p but low graphics).

The thing is that I've never used anything faster than an i7 + HDD (with GPU). So when my old one died, I just started using my ever so slightly slower laptop as main device.

I firmly believe that as long as you have not experienced the difference (which I haven't) it does not bother you. Applications don't start lightning fast, when I open the terminal I need to wait a second before I can start typing. So I start Spotify, Firefox alongside my terminal and after ~10 seconds I'm up and running for the rest of the day.

I'm not that bothered about waiting 10 seconds each day.

You really should be. I am continually amazed at how, even though computers have become orders of magnitude faster since the early 90s, everything still feels pretty much exactly as slow.

Let me put it this way: A 2nd gen i5 can execute about 6 instructions per cycle per core. At 3Ghz, that's 18 billion instructions every second or 5e-11 seconds per instruction. If each of those instructions is a second to the processor's subjective experience, then 18 billion of them is about 570 years. It takes 3 times that to startup an application for typing text into a document.

I didn't even take multicore into account.

It's very annoying. Especially since the reason I use gnome-characters is because I'm in the middle of typing something and I need a character that's not easy to type on my keyboard, so it's already a distraction from what I'm trying to do.

As an aside, I've been trying out Ubuntu for the last 6 months, and this is one example of the lack of polish I'm seeing. I don't remember installing gnome-characters explicitly (it's possible I just forgot doing so), but there are two versions on my machine, one of which happens to have this crazy startup lag. Another annoyance is that firefox came installed as a snap, which meant that all of my downloads went to something like ~/snap/firefox/Downloads instead of the expected ~/Downloads. I don't remember these kind of things happening when I ran Fedora...

3 seconds (AppImage) vs. 7 seconds (Flatpak) vs. 13 seconds (Snap) is a HUGE difference for me. No matter how modern the hardware

Snap also pollutes my disk list to the point that, without further effort on my part, regular ol' "df -h" is basically unusable. And it seems to leave old versions of things like VLC hanging around, for some reason, judging from same disk list.

It's high on my "hope it fails" list of Linux software. Sorry everyone who works on it :-(. General idea's good, but back to the drawing board, please. Or not and I'll just be less happy with any distros that push it on me, I guess.

Most likely it is a preload issue. With the apt version, the libraries are already preloaded on your system, because they are shared and in use.

With the snap version, the application needs to load up the common core image, then load the set of libraries that are specific to the application. The core image can probably get preloaded, but the set of libraries that are specific to the application probably not. Definitely in the disk cache, but maybe not preloaded.

I would say it's slow the application itself (it uses the Gnome Javascript interpreter), I've never noticed before but on my desktop, for example, the flatpaked Gedit is faster to start than non-flatpak gnome-characters version.

P.S. launched from a terminal, gjs start instantly tho

The AppImage is still twice as fast as the Flatpak, and three times as fast as the Snap. So it can't be the application itself, can it?

I was commenting on awelkie experience with gnome-characters, in my case (native) it's slower on starting up than the Flatpaked Gedit.

LibreOffice/OpenOffice instead, from what I can remember, I've always found it slow on startup. ^__^

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