* The infamous forced updates are a business decision, not a technical one. Canonical took a page from Microsoft by taking control away from the user only to sell it back in an "enterprise" edition of the product (see their Brand stores).
* Applications installed as snaps are slow to start up because they are always stored in compressed form and must be decompressed to run.
I don't understand what technical limitation prevents Snap from installing newer versions of an application in parallel with the old one, like how Flatpak updates work.
This is no longer true. You can disable updates for a snap indefinitely:
https://snapcraft.io/docs/keeping-snaps-up-to-date#heading--...
Apparently this is fixed, though I think only on new snap package builds. Benchmarks are available that demonstrate that slow snap load times are no longer an issue (but the grapevine persists in saying that it is).
> Snap from time to time asks to close a Snap-installed app to be able to update and often it seems it cannot update anyway.
Acknowledged and being fixed.
Thanks, good to know. I had this issue with Bitwarden. I'm testing it now and it seems to be much faster than some weeks ago so that's nice.
Part of the design, snaps are a compressed disk image that has to be decompressed the first time it's started after a reboot.