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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

Is there a problem with Snap beyond Canonical forcing its adoption in Ubuntu and the potential for surveillance capitalism by Canonical? As a package deliver/installation mechanism is it objectively better or worse than Flackpack (or whatever all is completing in that space) or does it all just boil down to "I hate Snap because Canonical is being icky?"

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This was Ubuntu 20.04 so maybe things have changed, but slow startup (calculators should open instantly), forced auto-update (yay Firefox forcing me to restart in the middle of doing something) were the egregious ones.

Same experience, with also a strange non-standard folder for binaries in the user's home.

Indeed; it's appalling. This thread [1] shows the absurdity of the situation; almost 8 years, and no signs of a XDG-compatible behavior. At least now you can hide it under ˜/.snap using the experimental flag "system experimental.hidden-snap-folder=true"

[1] Please move the "$HOME/snap" directory to a less obtrusive location https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1575053

So another program poluting the home directory. People doing this shall be banned from publishing SW (hello Firefox, KDE).

I don't remember specifically if it was the calculator, but at the time I remeber installing a ridiculously simple app, that should be a 5 mega download max, and snap installing a monstrosity of more than 1 gig in size on my disk. It's atrocious and wasteful.

It is for your own safety. Think about the children.

Nowadays, processor power is infinite, memory is infinite, disk space is infinite, so why so many people complaining ? /s

There has been a lot of improvements since then, both performance wise and auto-update wise.

firefox snap updates in ubuntu22.04 have always been difficult to deal with, and it still updates automatically, screwing up the current session. That sort of nonsense is why I cannot setup a laptop with ubuntu for grandma to use.

I suppose this page should tell how things have improved, but its ridiculous tall cookie wall kept me out of the site: https://ubuntu.com/blog/firefox-snap-updates-and-upgrades

nope, that's essentially the problem. Snap is curated and controlled by Canonical and they are forcing the issue.

The issues that both share are slow starts, larger package sizes, lack of safe ways to interact with the rest of the OS, etc.

Base concept is actually really good- Separating out dependencies and "containerizing/sandboxing" userspace applications is just a no brainier from a security and maintenance point of view. Its so nice to be able to easily install several versions side by side and know you arent fucking up system dependencies. Once they (flatpack, snap, some future competitor/iteration) iron out the kinks it'll 100% be the way systems are managed.

Yeah, super slow startup of apps, themes not applying correctly with snap versions when they do fine with non-snap versions, inability to control when updates happen (this has been fixed since 20.04 but it was a huge PITA), a zillion weird entries in fstab, and multiple ways to manage packages on the same system. It is all a mess. I just recently moved off of 20.04 and after trying a few distros ended up on Linux Mint because not only are snaps completely disabled, they have a system in place for basing off vanilla debian instead of ubuntu if ubuntu ever makes it impossible to skip the snaps.

Snap is locked down on ubuntu as I understand it so you can't really use a different source than Canonical's. The end game is probably for Canonical to be gatekeeper to all your software and extract some kind of toll once you're trapped. Avoiding this kind of situation is one of the main reasons I left Windows.

You can compare the pros and cons once you create your own flatpak and snap repositories, like you can with apt.

Oh wait. You can't do that with snap. Snap is pretty much locked down, so Canonical is the proverbial troll on the bridge.

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