I see people hate snap packaging and removing it if their OS support it. Is it because it’s NOT fully open-source or just due to how the technology works?
Update: fixed typos
Here’s my answer to this same question from an old thread on Reddit:
My Ubuntu system always reserved a whopping 20% of my 32GB ram for no reason and I never bothered to know why. Later I uninstalled snapd because of boot time issues and guess what happened? Only 1.5 GB used after a fresh boot.
I had like 4 different JetBrains IDEs installed via snap with each totalling around 2GB of disk space. While removing snapd I discovered it kept back 2-3 previous versions of every package on your disk.
Uninstalling this bloat was the best thing I did to my ubuntu system. It was suddenly light as a feather and way more responsive like I just did a fresh system install.
Some time later I was installing something from apt and Ubuntu tried to install it from snap, thus sneakily installing snapd in the process. Looking for a solution, I felt like I was looking up how to disable Windows updates or some other shit.
I had a moment of clarity and wondered why the fuck did I have to put up with this kinda bullshit on Linux. I wiped that drive clean and switched to Fedora.
I wiped that drive clean and switched to Fedora.
I might need to switch over as well, but I really don’t like rpm (or whatever that’s called on fedora, zypper or something? or was that suse?). I’ve been a Debian user since woody was a new thing and then at some point I gradually moved to ubuntu due to better desktop experience and more up to date packages (back then Debian stable really wasn’t anywhere close of bleeding edge) and PPA support was great for my needs. Now I have ubuntu installations which have gone trough upgrades for years and installations I have doesn’t seem to work like I want them to. Some of the issues will most likely stay (as RMS said, nvidia rapes babies or something like that) but in general I don’t like my browser, signal client and whatnot to notify me that I need to shut them down NOW since they’ll upgrade at some point in next 3-6 months. Simple apt dist-upgrade isn’t enough anymore and the systems require more and more TLC than I’m willing to give to them. Snapd is at least related to the issues I have 8 times out of 10.
Ubuntu just doesn’t have the feel it used to and it’s getting annoying enough that the simpler way would be just to reinstall everything and switch to something else, even if it takes some time and effort to migrate 5+ year old installations to new system.
If you don’t want something completely different, PopOS is a great, snap free, distribution based on Ubuntu. It’s what Ubuntu should have been.
Mint also packages stuff that Ubuntu has rolled into snaps
Maybe LM:DE (Linux Mint: Debian Edition)? Obscure software can be a pain to install for the usual reason, but otherwise I’m finding this to be a great distro. Second choice is Solus, but that’s even worse when it comes to software.
Fedora uses DNF, with rpms under the hood, not sure how that works, haha. Honestly I have no problems with it. I’m no power user, but it does everything I need. The only downside being kinda slow repo fetches.
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If you want up-to-date packages then just switch to testing
One of my biggest gripes about Windows was updates, virus scans and compatibility scans running autonomously while I am trying to get stuff done, sucking up network, drive access and CPU. I didn’t need Ubuntu doing the same thing to me - I want to kick off updates manually when I am taking a break for lunch or at the end of the day before shutdown.
As a power use this drives me nuts, but I know plenty of end users who are better off with those things turned on.
I actually think jetbrains are the ones keeping old versions. On my windows machine, when I get an ide update, the old one is saved so I can revert back to it.
Perhaps it’s been fixed since, but a this type of thing was the main issue with snaps to me:
“Why can’t the program see the printer? Ubuntu can see the printer”
“Why can’t I save to this USB pen? It can’t even see it”
“These two programs are meant to work together, but they can’t see each other”
“I can’t open my project from my external drive”
“It won’t let me import the photos from my camera. It can’t see the camera”
Would have been less of an issue if they had an android-style permissions pop-up with each incident, but snaps just left you silently failing.
This was my experience too. Ubuntu asks if I want to install the docker snap, I say sure. I then try to use docker and it’s completely unable to do what I need. I then need to figure out how to uninstall the snap and then install docker normally.
I tried a few snaps, but everytime they were a pain in the ass and I regretted it. Now I avoid them at all costs
this is exactly my experience
There is absolutely such a thing as too much sandboxing, and flatpak is already pushing the limit.
I don’t know enough to dislike snaps, I’m just spiteful enough to dislike cannonical trying to force me to use them
You’re so real for this
Linux Mint’s criticism of snap. Mint is based on Ubuntu.
Because I can’t dismiss the Firefox update notification, no matter how many times I update it.
I’ve had to reboot every time.
Which, way to go you’ve reimplemented windows xp era updates.
Stop the app and run “snap refresh” and it should update anything that’s queued
yes, I did kill the process and update the image though snap.
this did nothing to remove the update notification that cannot be dismissed without rebooting.
Oh, weird. The notification itself disappeared for me when I click it (KDE)
maybe they fixed it, I switched to Debian over a year ago.
Along with the other comments, imagine if people started to say, “I like Linux but it’s too slow and bloated, so I upgraded to Windows 11.”
I remember when the snap version of calculator took like 12 seconds to launch and Canonical were like “yeah but what’s the big deal?”.
It basically turns your super fast Linux into feeling like a 10 year old windows machine.
I hear they have improved performance now though but there are many other reasons why snap suck.
I hear they have improved performance now though
It’s still not great. Better, but still slow enough to make you question whether you’ve actually launched the app or not.
tldr;
canonical …
- keepes the snap store closed source and all snap packages and distribution under their control
- “silently” replaces packages (like firefox) with their snap versions
- will completly remove support for alternatives (like flatpak)
They don’t respect your setting on OS version updates either.
I was running 22.04 with the firefox ppa, but the minute i shifted from 22.04 lts to 22.10, they reinstalled the firefox snap and a bunch of new ones as well. Ive purged them all again, but it looks like every update will bw this same fight. I ahoulsnt have to write an ansible playbook to fight my OS vendor.
Debain 12 with flatpac to fill the gaps is looking better and better by the day.
They don’t respect your setting on OS version updates
I was running 22.04 with the firefox ppa, but the minute i shifted from 22.04 lts to 22.10, they reinstalled the firefox snap and a bunch of new ones as well.
Seems like canonical wants to be the only software distributor for their OS. Wouldn’t suprise me if they completely disabled the option to install other repos and DEB packages soon.
Debain 12 with flatpac to fill the gaps is looking better and better by the day.
agreed
Wasn’t there an article posted here that the next ubuntu update won’t have deb support at first and it’ll come later? 100% chance they decide to be an immutable snap-based distro in the near future.
Disrespecting preferences, having to fight the OS… hm, where have I heard that before? 🤔
At best it works more or less the same as an ordinary package. It only gets worse from there.
Several times I’ve been stuck on a broken version of Discord because on the server side they force an update to the new client, and the new client has not been packaged as a Snap yet.
Getting native hosts to work in Firefox is possible, but a giant pain in the butt.
Basically anything that needs filesystem access is unreasonably troublesome. I gave up on getting Snaps to work with my external drives.
There is simply no scenario where I think “wow, I sure am glad this was packaged as a Snap!” There have been many scenarios where I thought “god dammit why is this a Snap?!”
Several times I’ve been stuck on a broken version of Discord because on the server side they force an update to the new client, and the new client has not been packaged as a Snap yet.
To be fair this is more of an issue with Discord than snap… Would be understandable if it was an urgent security fix but they do it every time, and then it breaks for everybody who is using anything else than the deb or tar.gz they provide.
Workaround for Fedora: Edit
/usr/lib64/discord/resources/build_info.jsonand increase the version number to whatever Discord tells you is the new version. And hope that the update wasn’t a fix for some remote code execution vulnerability :)
Snaps have centralized control. Canonical has to approve a snap package. Flatpak is like most of Linux. Anyone can make a Flatpak. Also, in my experience, Snaps had a lot of issues early on that were not present in Flatpaks. Now, Flatpak dominates and Snaps kinda feel like a irrelevant runner in a race long after the officials closed competition packed it up and went home.
Hmmm, can we just sticky a “snaps are bad” thread? I like to see activity but this same question keeps getting asked.
Also sticky Red Hat’s “response”, it should deter most of the neolibs.
Short answer: Canonical is strong arming Ubuntu flavors into removing support for alternatives to snap (that run better and do the same thing). These types of decisions are generally worse for the overall Linux community.
Right now, a part of the Linux and Open Source communities are distancing themselves from corporate-sponsored projects given issues we’ve recently seen with RedHat’s CentOS and Canonical’s decisions with Snap and LXD
Bloat and coersion from canonical when using Ubuntu.
Also I hate typing mount on my home machine and sifting through a sea of mountpoints.
Had a low end laptop, i believe it was lubuntu that i installed because i knew ubuntu was too bloated for that laptop. However I was not aware that it used snap and running firefox kick started the fans on that old laptop. Resouce hog seen and searching for firefox direct binary from apt seemed like a chore so i replaced with mint. Snaps automatically i did not want to deal with for old computers. Was happy with mints removal of snaps and it is very user friendly.
Canonical has a history of ignoring established practices and established software projects in the FOSS community and instead rolling their own in-house competitor behind CLA licensing agreements that make it hard for community developers to contribute. It feels like an embrace-extend-extinguish situation to me. They did it with Unity (replacing GNOME 3), Mir (replacing Wayland), and now Snap (replacing Flatpak). There are also technical reasons why many Linux users don’t want these userspace/sandboxed packages (Flatpak and AppImage included) taking over the position formerly occupied by native distribution packages (.deb, .rpm, pacman, apk, etc) because of issues with unnecessary copies of dependencies and poor integration with the rest of the system. These concerns apply to Snap as well, and Ubuntu has been pushing to replace .deb packages with snaps.
