Snaps are technically foss but the server thst hosts them are proprietary to Ubuntu, when flatpak is perfectly reasonable. It’s a bit of a pattern of things they do, finding solutions to things they weren’t really problems (cough netplan cough)

Performance and functionality.

When I click the Firefox icon, I expect Firefox to open. Like, right away.

When Ubuntu switched it to a snap, there was a noticeable load time. I’d click the icon and wait. In the background the OS was mounting a snap as a virtual volume or something, and loading the sandboxed app from that. It turned my modern computer with SSD into an old computer with a HDD. Firefox gets frequent updates, so the snap would be updated frequently, requiring a remount/reload every update.

Ubuntu tried this with many stock apps (like Calculator), but eventually rolled things back since so many people complained about the obvious performance issues.

I’m talking about literally waiting 10X the time for something to load as a snap than it did compared to a “regular” app.

The more apps you have as snaps, the more things have to be mounted/attached and slowly loaded. This also use to clutter up the output when listing mounted devices.

The Micropolis (GPL SimCity) snap loads with read-only permissions. i.e., you cannot save. There are no permission controls for write access (its snap permissions are only for audio). Basically, the snap was configured wrong and you can never save your game.

I had purged snapd from my system and added repos to get “normal” versions of software, but eventually some other package change would happen and snapd would get included with routine updates.

I understand the benefits of something like Snaps and Flatpaks - but you cannot deny that there are negatives. I thought Linux was about choice. I’ve been administering a bunch of Ubuntu systems at work for well over a decade, and I don’t like what the platform has been becoming.

Also, instead of going with an established solution (flatpak), Ubuntu decided to create a whole new problem (snap) and basically contributes to a splitting of the community. Which do you support? Which gets more developer focus to fix and improve things?

You don’t have to take my word for any of this. A quick Google search will yield many similar complaints.

For context:

Snaps are a way to build applications so that they can run on any platform with one build method. It makes it easier for developers to publish their apps across multiple different Linux distro without having to worry about dependency issues.

Snaps have been very poorly received by the community, one of the largest complaints is that a snap program with take 5-10 seconds to start, where as the same program without snap will start instantly.

Ubuntu devs have been working for years to optimize them, but it’s a complex problem and while they’ve made some improvements, it’s slow going. While this has been going on, Ubuntu is slowly doubling down more and more on snaps, such as replacing default apps with their snap counterparts.

On the other hand, other methods like flatpak exist, and are generally more liked by the community.

This has led to a lot of Ubuntu users feeling unheard as their feedback is ignored.

One word: snapd

If you like the idea of ubuntu, but wish to avoid ubuntu, you might want to check out Linux Mint.

I hadn’t considered the proprietary nature of snaps when I decided I didn’t like them. I just figured out their startup activity was adding 5 seconds to a 10 second boot despite not having installed any snaps

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You get a lot of recommendations for Mint here, but I’d like to toss in a recommendation for Pop!_OS. Also based on Ubuntu without all the crap. I would say the biggest difference between pop and mint is the UI, as Mint comes standard with cinnamon and pop with Gnome (soon cosmic) as their DE’s.

Just take a look at those two and choose one of them, they are both great distros, and absolutely the two I would recommend to just about anyone. Easy to use and very straightforward for new people trying out Linux.

Firefox is one of the worst snaps. It pops up an annoying notification everyday reminding you to restarted it. Then came the crashing. It got to a point where I couldn’t keep my browser running more than a few minutes at a time.

I wanted to like snaps, and I’m not overall negative on Ubuntu, but keeping the web browser functional is minimum requirement. The Firefox PPA is much more reliable.

The project maintainers repeatedly forget to renew their certificates, causing package upgrades to fail.

The project maintainers, in multiple past instances, have misconfigured their package manager resulting in essentially a DDoS of the AUR.

The packages are out of date vs. the upstream Arch ones, which often causes AUR packages intended for upstream Arch to break on Manjaro. Yet they consider the AUR a supported resource.

Project has had problems with mismanagement of funds in the past.

Despite all this, they seem to heavily focus on marketing, merch, and trying to sell preinstalled systems. Manjaro is in it for profit, not to make an awesome distro.

it’s a reddit imported hate-train because they didn’t renew certificates twice in twenty years and a bug in pamac cause the aur to be ddosed for a few hours total, to tell you how much of an empty bandwagon it is, few years back, manjaro tried to push a closed source office suite in their base installers and none of the clowns parroting anti-manjaro mantras ever mention it, they didn’t think about adding it to the agreed list of accusations in the early days so their copy pasted opinions don’t feature it.

If that were true then none of this would be news. The CentOS Stream code is available to the public on git, but not the RHEL code. If the RHEL code was available to the public the outrage would have no reason to exist.

Even if paying customers have access to the RHEL code via git, they are forbidden from redistributing it (which is allowed by the FOSS licenses that code is under) or else the customers lose their license. This does not qualify as the code being available in my opinion, and in the opinion of the vast majority of the FOSS community.

Saying everything is fine and dandy in the RHEL world is FUD.

I ran Gentoo for years. I run Arch now.

You’re not wrong, lol.

'Course, I was running Gentoo when hardware was slow enough that you could see the real-time performance improvement from tailored compiles. Now shit’s so fast that any gains are imperceptible by a human for day-to-day desktop usage. Arch can also be a bit of a time sink, I get it, especially setting it up takes time and thought. That’s also why I like it, and always come back to it: I can set it up exactly how I want it, and it’s really good at that. There’s always weird shit that seems to happen to me when I try to remove Gnome in Ubuntu or other crazy shit that, yeah, everyone would tell you not to do, but Arch doesn’t care. If I want combination of things, I can hunt for a distro that has it, or I can likely just set it up on Arch.

After setup, though, it’s not any more effort to maintain than any other distro. shrug

Binary speed is really the least reason to use Gentoo.

There are a lot of thorny issues in package distribution that source builds completely sidestep.

Install-it-yourself plus source updates are a lot to ask, but if you can get the hang of it the benefits are pretty sweet.

Yeah, that’s pretty much it. I don’t want to use a kit/show car for commuting.

Just use Arch in a Distrobox on Fedora or openSUSE. That’s the best of both worlds.

Customizing all-in-one distros is a shitty uphill battle that isn’t worth the trouble, so I get how Arch is worth the work there. But recommending a kit car when people are asking for a commuter just bugs me.

It is definitely not a bit more work. It’s hours and hours of reading manuals, following video guides and configuring every last detail.

This is a gross simplification

I don’t find this the case at all. I barely change the wallpaper, I’m not spending time removing a bunch of stuff I don’t use it just sits there unused. I did my time with Arch and Gentoo (before Arch existed) for years, but I would rather someone else do the work and I will use it as long as it has sane defaults, for my actual work that doesn’t care.

It doesn’t. All the time you spent reading manuals and tweaking configs to get it to boot quicker does.

If booting quicker means to have less/older software or a bloated system once running…

Damn I’m contemplating going to FreeBSD. What made you go the other way? What do you miss from FreeBSD?

Well, I like gentoo for it’s top notch security and I see why you’d use it for extremely security sensitive applications, but people that use it as a desktop are nuts.

But why bother using gentoo then?