Hacker News Reader

Comment by codethief | Hacker News Reader

> But the problem is: it's the slowest thing in the world.

Exactly. I recently had to replace Chromium with Google Chrome just because the Ubuntu maintainers thought it'd be a good idea to replace the Chromium apt package with an installer that pulls in the snap…

Good thing Firefox is my main browser and I only use Chromium/Chrome for testing (and whenever websites forget that there's more than just one browser to test for), otherwise I would have long ditched Ubuntu, too.

View on HN

I've been getting bug reports for a browser extension because of Snap. The file system isolation of Snap and Flatpak breaks Native Messaging, so extensions that need to communicate with a local app, such as password managers, are now broken.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+...

I had totally forgotten about this! For me it wasn't just the extensions. The font in the "Save Download As…" dialog in the Chromium snap, for instance, has been completely broken for me – all characters get displayed as the infamous glyph-not-found block. To make things worse, the dialog by default suggests some random directory deep inside the snap tree as download destination. Good luck navigating to a folder where you'll find your download again, given that you can't read any of the file or folder names…

I'm not a fan of Snap, but I'm surprised something like this font issue passed QA.

I think you overestimate the amount of QA resources available to the Ubuntu project. Looks like this was an issue that only happened after repeated use and seems somewhat related to individual systems' font configurations?

There's more info here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+...

I hope they conduct automated testing with screengrabs for high profile apps such as Chromium (that have something to gain from the snap isolation) and that the test cases have this added.

> I think you overestimate the amount of QA resources available to the Ubuntu project.

  s/available to/allocated by/

I don't know that Canonical cares too much about doing QA themselves. It seems like they've decided to delegate that to the userbase.

I've been using Linux for over 14 years exclusively. Build several linux hosting companies. I know Linux rather well. I've built a simple font manager for gnome in the past. I know the weirdness of gnome font thingies.

I've had this glyph issue for over a year. In chromium, Signal, some ebook app, and several other snaps.

I've tried many things. But gave up. Snap is not 'one layer of indirection' too much. It's hundreds of them. There's chroot, some VM, a virtual gnome, containerisation, weird user and permissions. And so on.

This complexity made me conclude that snap is a bad solution (to a real problem). Not the glyph issue, but the fact that I cannot fix it, is, for me, the reason to conclude it has, or will fail.

Wait, since when is Signal a Snap app?

Snap is a distribution format, akin to .msi or .pkg.

No, incorrect. Snap is a distribution format akin to VMDK or anything else which is not intended to be "installed" to a system, but rather run in a virtual machine or sandboxed.

If we are getting into details I think calling it a "virtual machine" is not correct either. Also since snaps have some integration with the host DE through launchers and so on they are not like VMDK's.

To be even more pedantic, there's nothing stopping you from using VMDK (or other disk images like VDI, VHD, raw/dd, etc) files as a container (like tar or zip), other than some extra overhead. They can easily integrate into your desktop environment, possibly even easier since there's probably more support for mounting disk images than there is for mounting archives...

Well, a squashfs file is already a disk image, so that's pretty much what they are doing.

Snap is more like a virtualization tool that you see in VDI and Citrix environments.

It’s sets out to solve a couple of problems in an app-focused way. As with any packager that packages dependencies, it introduces a few dozen more in the process.

Snap is already a standard in the IOT world. It's the desktop section in which it struggles.

This could be related to Why Chrome is using a different font size that the rest my system. Chrome is the only snap program that I have . The rest are plane Debian packages or Flatpack

Right! I ran into this not five minutes into a new 20.04 install and could not for the life of me figure out where the hell my download was, or why I couldn't access /home/julian/Downloads

Why this isn't more of a deal breaker I have no freaking idea.

Snap programs won't let me access /tmp/ which is really annoying ;(

Yeah, and I can find no way to either modify the fs or at least mount out. Opera, I think it is, requires codecs be installed in a specific directory. So, the snap is effectively useless.

oh my that THAT is why it takes over 5 seconds to start chromium on my Xeon...

That is really disappointing to read. We put a lot of effort into making Chrome start quickly. Back when I was responsible for Linux Chrome, I gave a lighting talk at the Ubuntu Developer Summit about it, and demoed Chrome starting faster than Gnome Calculator.

Not being snarky towards you — Chrome starts really quickly — but was that the snapped calculator from Ubuntu 18.04?

firefox from the ubuntu repository is over 5 times faster to start. on any windows machine, it's almost the opposite. sorry to break the news. for what it's worth I still use it everyday... I usually start my browser once a day so it's not that big of a difference.

Both chrome and Firefox on Ubuntu are basically instant for me. Chrome is installed without the snap rubbish tho.

Hats off, Chrome starts instantly on my Debian machines. Even on a 10 years old, half dead Thinkpad it's just couple of seconds. This must be a Ubuntu/Snap specific issue.

Today, starting faster than Ubuntu's calculator is not that hard. I bet this also became a snap app.

I have been using the snap versions of Chromium, Discord, CLion and Spotify for a while now and I haven't noticed any slowness whatsoever. Sure the applications need some seconds (at most 5) to start up on a freshly booted machine but other than that it's pretty snappy (heh). The only issue I have encountered so far is that some applications don't respect the environments cursor theme (looking at you Spotify and Postman) but that's easily fixable by the package maintainers. Other than that I really don't understand the hate-train for snap. Coming from Arch Linux, PPAs seem like a PITA to me and an elegant solution such as the AUR doesn't exist in the Ubuntu ecosystem so snap / flatpak are the next closest thing to it.

The 5 second load time is exactly the slowness people are complaining about. It's a ~100x slowdown.

Most applications on Macs start up instantaneously these days. 5 seconds is 50 times the limit for "instantaneous" feel. [1]

All of the raging discussions in this thread would be totally absent if Canonical had taken the time to make apps installed with snaps fast. Unfortunately, these days, the "make it work, make it right, make it fast" mantra seems to stop at the "make it work". At least the 20.04 release seems to be at that stage.

Congratulations, you just got a bunch of users who are going to avoid updates even more because you are going to make everything slower with your shiny new release.

-------------------

[1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/response-times-3-important-...

No, most apps are slow the first time they are run on Mac (not as bad as first run of snap though, usually). After that, pretty fast. AppStore apps seem to always be fast.

> Coming from Arch Linux

Genuinely curious, why would you not just keep using Arch?

In my case, too much gardening.

I got sick of it after six years or so and moved to Linux Mint. (This was before Manjaro was widely visible.) Been on Mint ever since: it's a better Ubuntu than Ubuntu, and a better Windows than Windows (for ordinary uses).

Note that Mint 20, although based on Ubuntu 2004, has removed snap from the base install. `apt install chromium-browser' takes you to a web page explaining why.

I'm curious to the kind of gardening you're referring to, that applies to Arch but not Mint?

I will say, Linux Mint is my recommended Debian based distro for desktop use, it really is a better Ubuntu than Ubuntu.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com