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Comment by smashed | Hacker News Reader

My first encounter with snaps was launching gcalc, the basic built-in calculator app.

At some point after an update, launching that app would take multiple seconds. How could the most basic gtk app be so slow to launch.

Investigating further, I found the update had transformed the normal gcalc package into a snap, probably just to prove how great snaps could be for desktop apps?

What a bad way to introduce your latest tech canonical. From then on, my opinion of snaps was very negative and I still do everything possible to avoid them. Even if they are technically great or more secure, canonical messed up their introduction and are now stuck pushing a dead horse.

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My last Kubuntu update (to 22.04) broke because, I think, I'd disabled snaps and the update required snap installs (including Firefox). The update had a "install snap version of Firefox" stage with the only option being OK/Yes ... so install broke. They were so up themselves that they removed the option to cancel snap install despite it not being for essential elements of the OS; I had to kill them installer.

My first brush with fat-packages was Digikam stopping producing .deb packages, it put in so much overhead I couldn't run it on my (admittedly weak) system. The forced use of Firefox snap lost configuration, then failed to work properly (permission problems) ... it's like how the use of file managers via sudo was stopped, seemingly without a proper plan to replace it; make the new tech first, then implement it when it works! It's like going back to Windows, having fragmented app sources and forced updates that wreck everything.

I'm not sure where to move to next, I came to Ubuntu years ago because I no longer wanted to do the config work necessary to run Slackware. Looks like Mint/Arch/Debian are contenders.

Firefox is the only thing I had problems with, and this was quickly fixed by adding the Mozilla PPA. I haven't run into any snap problems (I apt-get purge'd snapd).

Tested Kubuntu after frustration with gnome 3+ and over a decade on Ubuntu, but was very disappointed. Someone more knowledgable than me strongly recommended KDE Neon (Ubuntu LTS-based distro by KDE themselves) over Kubuntu. Me, I figured I don't need K apps and a full-fledged desktop environment; ended up going back to Mac OS for now.

That was also my first introduction to snap. Spent a while trying to figure out why the calc app was so slow all of a sudden. Switched to popos eventually.

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