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Comment by zyga | Hacker News Reader

It's still work in progress but snaps genuinely make packaging easier. There are rough edges, especially on the desktop, but those are all being worked on, in collaboration with flatpak actually.

It will take a while but in the future it will not be any worse at runtime and it will be much, much easier to package and run apps across releases and OSes

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Ubuntu had the calculator as a snap! What's the idea with that? It suddenly took 2 secs to load and uses load of memory...

I dont care packaging got easier. I care for a smooth working system I can understand and instrument, and that does not hog resources.

And some times, on some systems, the calculator got all transparent, and unusable, so, I left Ubuntu after that. Granted I was on LTS'es almost all of the time, so, this might be highly circumstantial and subjective. But I've been there as you apparently also have. I hope snap improves for the best of all, it seems amateurish to push snap-apps, at their then-current state, in LTS releases. I left basically after Ubuntu 14.04, and even that, 14.04, was a let-down from 12.04, and so on. In my experiences.

Snap and flatpak are great fallback methods. I first try installing software natively, but sometimes it's not available/compatible and you really need it to work, so flatpak is great to just get it running at all.

I'm not a fan of using it as the default though, and flatpak isn't immune to issues either, for example I use a flatpak package which regularly can't be updated for months because of some incorrect metadata if the error message can be believed.

I still think it's a good step forward for increasing compatibility especially across different Linux distributions.

They may be fallback methods, but snap is for sure not "great" (not a finished product as other have pointed out). As you also understood, snap is sadly not promoted as a fallback method.

This stuff is pushed with corporate power. Not adopted because great great fallback method it provides.

The compatibility is also balkanized for the start with the flatpack/snap split. Pfff, what a mess.

Oh! Is _that_ why the calculator is nigh unusable now? Sheesh, this just shot snap's credibility right out the window. It's faster for me to boot up the node executable and do my calculations there.

`bc -l` is pretty awesome.

Yes! But you can "fix" it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21650743

The minimal fix for the sluggish calculator on Ubuntu 18.04 to 19.10:

  sudo snap remove gnome-calculator
  sudo apt install gnome-calculator

The more complete solution is entirely removing snap. I did that long ago, but my process was a little painful. From my logs, it went something like this:

  snap list
  snap remove <copy-paste packages from above>
  sudo service snapd restart # core is tricky to get rid of
  sudo snap remove core
  snap list # check it's empty
  sudo apt install gnome-calculator gnome-characters gnome-logs gnome-system-monitor
  sudo apt purge snapd squashfs-tools gnome-software-plugin-snap
  rm -r ~/snap

Do you know why, technically, being packaged as a snap would increase start time and memory usage?

Also not yet possible to install a snap using a chroot yet : https://bugs.launchpad.net/snappy/+bug/1609903 (the bug has been open for 3 years). Chroots are a key mechanism to building any customized Linux image.

I hope they smooth these rough edges further before they push more snaps onto the world.

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