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.

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.