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Comment by emerongi | Hacker News Reader

Snaps are super laggy. GNOME calculator on Ubuntu runs in a snap and it is baffling that whoever made the decision to package it in a snap by default was OK with the fact that it takes 2 seconds to launch a basic calculator on a 2017 laptop (edit: re-tested, it took 5 seconds).

To top it off, a couple months ago my calculator disappeared. For some reason I have been having problems with snap applications disappearing for a while now, even though I have made no configuration changes. How fun it is to discover that such a basic tool just no longer exists on your machine, way to fuck up a morning.

I get that snaps make application distribution easier, but please don't do it at the expense of the user. I've had more success with Flatpak and AppImages, but not enough experience with any of them to judge which is best.

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This move made me 100% opposed to snap. Don't beta test on my daily-drivers as a default.

The calculator should -always- load in a couple ms. It's one of the simplest tools on the shelf! If a calculator snap can't load immediately then I have no interest in a single other snap app. Waiting more than a second is a nightmare, and I've definitely waited 5+ seconds at times. That's about how long it takes my system to boot. As far as I'm concerned it's a complete failure and I couldn't possibly trust it on any desktop or server that I manage.

This is exactly my experience. On top of that snap creates visible directories in $HOME, f-up my loop devices and snap applications can't even access /tmp. Never had any problems with flatpak and appimage. I will however use it solely for proprietary software.

> On top of that snap creates visible directories in $HOME, f-up my loop devices

This. snap seems to spew traces of itself all over the place on an Ubuntu install, and it's less than clear why any of them are there.

It's weird how modernized things can end up so bad at their original purpose. Like a computer being a bad calculator.

The same thing with phones. Smart phones are good at a lot of things, but they are mediocre as a telephone.

I think it's because they extract compressed rootfs tar each time to be mounted in LXC container. Even with a beefy computer, it takes considerable time.

What is weird to me is that apparently there has not been someone in a position of power in this project that would go "Wait guys, this is not good. Any other ideas? How can we improve?"

No, just roll on with it.

There was a period of time, around 2010-2015 when I really felt that computers were fast. SSDs were getting more affordable and that was a huge improvement, every action was immediately responsive. In 2020, that has somehow been undone. It takes 5 seconds to launch a calculator. Software guys really like to undo all the advances that the hardware guys are doing.

In that period, computers made a significant leap forward, and it took developers some time to catch up and fully utilize surplus performance.

Somebody somewhere is probably running a calculator as an electron app that takes 10 seconds to open.

You don't even need Electron. The "modern" Windows 10 calculator takes a dozen seconds to start on my laptop.

An electron app packaged as a snap.

Why does that take considerable time? I’m curious as to the technical reasons.

I think gnome-calculator was just an experiment for Ubuntu 18.04 to test snap packages. In 20.04 it has been switched back.

Sounds like Windows with their UWP apps. Calculator also used to take 5 secs to load. It’s down to about a second now but still baffles me to think that MS management are ok with that

Agreed!

I guess people at MS test and quality departments use I7 with an SSD driver. If so, it's bad. If not it's simply hard to understand, if we leave corporate politics aside.

To me, the calculator has always been more or less OK, but the Image Viewer is a clusterfuck.

With the old viewer, it's almost instantanious opening by clicking a file in windows explorer. The new one is slow as a crawl. The first time may take 5 or 6 seconds (in a 7 year old laptop). The next time is down to 2 or 3. Compare that to milliseconds using the native app. I've never felt the need to use an specific image viewer, but now I'm happy with Irfanview, as fast as the old app, and full of features.

How do such things pass triage stages?

My calculator is now the plain Python interpreter

Have you tried `bc`? I find it faster to start than Python.

The difference is not noticeable, at least on my computer, and since Python is the language I work with the most these days, I always have one REPL opened

can confirm, have exact same problem with the exact same software (gnome-calculator).

I now switched to xcalc. gnome-calculator is better, honestly, but it's not worth feeling in the 90ies.

You can uninstall the snap package for gnome-calculator and install the apt package instead.

I just did it and it's quick to boot up again as it should :)

Well, there is always bc and dc.

not sure if it is only snaps... my galculator takes a couple seconds to open and it isn't a snap... maybe gnome is the issue

why the down vote? I don't even use *buntu... Not that I like snaps, but it just got a lot slower lately

I have no issues with your original comment. But in regards to your "why the down vote?" question, HN's guidelines state:

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

I somewhat disagree with this interpretation, I see more as using the votes as part of the argument "considering the downvotes you are wrong" and similar. In this case he got the signal that many people disagree with his message but cannot understand why.

It is one thing when you make a controversial statement and then decide to attack downvoters, it is a different thing if you are trying to understand how and why people disagreed with you.

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