this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2024
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I don't have personal experience with them, but I keep hearing they're very slow to start.
And I dislike them on principle, because Canonical tries to push snaps as the main distro-agnostic way of installing software, but they are hard-coded to only work with Canonical's servers. It reminds me of the embrace-extend-extinguish strategy of Microsoft.
I'm far from an enjoyer of snaps BUT snaps do support other custom stores and aren't tied to the snap store, contrary to popular belief.
Also, the fix for making snap startup times has been developed and released but most existing snaps haven't patched their snaps to support it (last I heard, the only notable exception (aka the only known snap to have good startup times) is the Firefox snap).
From what I read they only support one single snap store though, so if you don't use the Canonical store, you lose access to all the third party software that's actually the point of snaps.
Snap does theoretically support other stores, but the code for the canonical store is proprietary so you’d have to reverse engineer a snap store and hope that canonical doesn’t break it with an update. Also apart from Ubuntu nobody uses snaps so why would anyone make a snap store? Btw they have improved snaps with faster start times and such, so they aren’t that much slower than packages or flatpak.
Snaps aren't that slow anymore. They closed the gap a couple of months ago. (I still dislike snaps and ubuntu for pushing them)