Actually, the better question is: When will they replace most desktop Linux programs?

  • Alexmitter
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    1 year ago

    Snap? It is fundamentally broken and Canonical shows zero interest in fixing that. Instead they try to patch applications to not be as awful when running via Snap.
    Firefox is the best example, its a big application and suffers greatly from taking forever to start on Snap because of course the filesystem image is compressed, so it needs to be uncompressed, mounted and then firefox can start which is still slowed greatly due to snaps poor I/O performance.

    A unpatched firefox took 30 seconds to start on Snap, they patched it to load only one language pack and some other small things, and now it starts in incredible 15 seconds.

    Which is shit poor compared to the native firefox starting in one second and the flatpak starting in also one second. All on the same machine.

    Snap is by far the most cruel joke out of canonical.

    Flatpak has no such problems.

    • atmur
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      41 year ago

      100% agree. Snaps are kind of neat for server stuff (easiest setup of Nextcloud I’ve ever done, even though I switched to Docker in the end), but man the desktop experience is god awful.

      I had to setup an Ubuntu VM at work to run something I couldn’t do on the Windows host, I tried to open Firefox and it took ages to start. I literally began trying to troubleshoot why it wasn’t opening before it finally started. Completely unusable and I have no idea why Canonical thinks this is an actual competitor to Flatpak.

      • Alexmitter
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        101 year ago

        Snaps are kind of neat for server stuff

        Theoretically yes, until you find out that Snap will force update your server snaps without any way to disable it. Best you can do is pause it. This is absolutely unacceptable for anyone serious about server stuff.

    • softpboy
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      11 year ago

      Can’t tell how’s snap today. I refused to use it when snap vlc couldn’t access an external drive, and it wasn’t by mistake, snap couldn’t (and I’m nos sure if it can today) access external drives. I looked how to fix it and apparently canonical knew it and was ok with that, they said it was a feature of snap packages so, bye bye ubuntu, hello manjaro (back then, now I use debian)