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Comment by _pvka | Hacker News Reader

You have a good point about making the desktop experience more painless and idiot-proof.

The real problem for me though is that snaps are slow as hell. I mean like taking 4-5+ seconds to open on a box with an SSD, i7, and 64GB of RAM. That's unacceptable.

The icing on the cake for me is that even through the command line as you mention apt now seems to be giving me snaps instead of debs for a great deal of programs, which affects much more than the store experience. And, also, regarding said store experience: if stuff like Spotify takes 5+ seconds to open I doubt a user coming from Windows giving Linux a try is going to want to stick around long...it would be great if there was just a better solution.

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I second this, I couldn't care less about snaps, flatpacks, debs.

But snaps are - for me - A LOT SLOWER than everything else out there.

*.deb, binaries run stuff in less than a second.

Flatpacks, appimage, I have those running in a second or two. Snap, for the same app takes 3-5 sec. sometimes (I wouln't know why), it evens takes as much as 8-10 sec.

NOBODY can get a pass on artificially making slower apps in 2020.

> making the desktop experience more idiot-proof.

"If you make it idiot proof only idiots will want to use it". - this holds true. Canonical made the conscious and deliberate decision to treat users like morons by not even giving us the ability to decide how and when to install updates.

I gave up on Windows because of their blindly hostile approach to users, I won't be installing the latest Ubuntu - opting for Mint instead.

You're right, Apple is heating in the same direction by locking down macOS for power users :(

> The real problem for me though is that snaps are slow as hell. I mean like taking 4-5+ seconds to open on a box with an SSD, i7, and 64GB of RAM. That's unacceptable.

Spotify is specifically one of the snaps I use and frankly, I noticed it seemed to start a little slow but just assumed that was because of Electron or something. I literally don't care and never thought anything of it. I run it, it starts, and then I don't close it.

Besides, if Spotify users reject it, they can always switch to PPA or something else. It's their choice.

> apt now seems to be giving me snaps instead of debs for a great deal of programs,

"a great deal"? I've seen two mentioned, chromium and lxd. Where else have you encountered this where Debian has a package available from a maintainer but a snap shim is used instead?

Apt will also tell you a snap is available if there's no deb but that's just useful information.

> if Spotify users reject it, they can always switch to PPA or something else

Some apps, like Chromium have no alternative ppas available.

I installed KDE Neon 20.04 and when I discovered that Chromium was being switchted to snap, I searched for any current *.deb out there. NO proper ppas, just found some outdated Chromium 1-3 versions behind the current version.

If it wasn't for the KDE from Neon, I would have switched of distro in the hour. I switched to Chrome instead.

Got some old compiled Chromium just to have the thing available (I can just run it when I need it, it takes maybe 1/4 of sec to start).

Just hope Canonical doesn't try its snap thing in more critical packages or (FAR) worst, in the LTS server versions.

I would be getting popcorn to see the show when half the Internet start to ditch the LTS overnight over some half-propietary half-baked software being put in charge of its otherwise perfectly GPLed infrastructures.

Right, this is why Canonical moved Chromium to snaps - It's a ton of effort building Chromium for 20.04, 18.04, and all the intermediate releases every few weeks for a package that's in universe.

It's cheaper/easier for them to publish one version across all of Ubuntu.

> Besides, if Spotify users reject it, they can always switch to PPA or something else. It's their choice.

This is not what happens. The vast majority of users don't know or care why something is slow. They'll just say "Ugh, Linux is slow, I'm going back to Windows."

It's definitely not launching slowly due to Electron, because it's not Electron :)

It's C++ with CEF

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