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 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.”
deleted by creator
because the snap folder in your home directory by default starts with a lowercase letter while all the other folders start with uppercase (hidden folders don’t count)
all other reasons are secondary
This is such a stupid minor thing, but it’s what made me switch from Ubuntu to Fedora, haha.
Downloads and Documents starting with a capital letter is my biggest pet peeve with Ubuntu. It makes it a lot more annoying to navigate through them than if it was all lower case.
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.
Bloat and coersion from canonical when using Ubuntu.
Also I hate typing mount on my home machine and sifting through a sea of mountpoints.
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.
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.
Snap is not fully open source. It’s slower than flatpak, it’s centralized to Canonical’s servers.Flatpaks so not update by default where snaps do, so if a feature breaking update is released and you haven’t disabled automatic updates, you’re screwed with snap. Flatpak does not need admin privileges where snaps do.
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
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.
Because people still believe in one standard to rule them all.
