The controversy around snaps is growing :-(

[Tom H]

On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 9:33 PM Oliver Grawert <ogra at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Am Sonntag, den 03.05.2020, 20:56 +0200 schrieb Tom H:
>> On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 11:33 PM Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> This expresses some of my own concerns:
>>>
>>> https://jatan.blog/2020/05/02/ubuntu-snap-obsession-has-snapped-me-off-of-it/
>>
>> * Software center can’t install Flatpak apps
>>
>> For the GUI, from the linked discourse.ubuntu.com: "For flatpak you
>> just need to install gnome-software-plugin-flatpak like you do today.
>> That would bring in the gnome-software as a deb, which will still be
>> maintained."
>>
>> To me, not being able to install Flatpaks by default on Ubuntu is
>> like not being able to install RPMs on Ubuntu; except that in the
>> case of Flatpaks, you can do so with a little work.
>
> ... and funnily nobody notices that it is equally "hard" to get snap
> support on fedora, snaps arent the default there and you need to
> manually fiddle to get the supported ... it is simply a choice of
> defaults ... this is linux ! just adjust them if you feel this is
> needed for you !
>
> ;)

LOL

Indeed. There was even a Fedora developer who proposed, when the first
snap press release was sent (2016?), to disallow snap (the "base") in
Fedora because Snap had beaten Flatpak in development and marketing.
SO I'm not surprised that there's residual resistence. But one of the
reasons that Fedora dislikes Snap is that it uses apparmor rather than
selinux.


>> * Slow and forced Chromium snap
>>
>> I've just installed the Chromium snap and it launches as quickly as
>> my non-Snap Chrome, Chromium, and Firefox. My other Snap apps -
>> Skype, Zoom - also launch quickly. The writer's been suspended from
>> discourse.ubuntu.com, so I doubt his sincerity on the slowness point.
>
> there is noticeable slowness on the very first start of a freshly
> installed desktop app, simply because a bunch of user environment is
> being set up then (i.e. chromium generates a per-user mime database
> on first start) ... subsequent starts have a measurable (but not
> really noticeable) startup delay in the half-second area ... there
> are a few threads on forum.snapcraft.io discussing it (and discussing
> improvements) ...
>
> shipping apps as compressed readonly filesystem blobs and maintaining
> confinement around the executables at runtime sadly comes with a cost.
> but IMHO (as someone who maintains a bunch of snaps) the benefit
> prevails ...

OK. I remember Skype launching VERY slowly the first time that I
launched it. But that's it.