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Comment by andreareina | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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).

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

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