Snaps: The good, the bad, and the ugly

-

In recent versions, Canonical is trying to push snaps at the Ubuntu desktop a lot more. I think that this is not good for Ubuntu and the Linux desktop in general, so here are my thoughts on snap in Ubuntu.

First, what snaps are good for. First and foremost is server use. Now, I don't run any Ubuntu servers, but from what I have seen, snaps make it easier to distribute and update applications on a server environment. But honestly, there is not a single other thing that I can see that is good with snaps.

The bad starts out with theming. EVERY SINGLE SNAP that I have seen only supports three GTK themes: Adwaita, Ambiance, and Yaru. The only way to fix that is to append --classic to the installer on some programs, but most programs that don't require that don't allow that. That means that if you are theming, snaps will stay at Adwaita-light. This is more of a problem for other flavors of Ubuntu like Ubuntu MATE where snaps always look out of place, especially with the older Adwaita theme used in older GNOME versions. And don't get me started on Qt applications. Applications like NotepadQQ look straight out of Windows 95 on every distro, EVEN KUBUNTU! Cursors still look wrong on a lot of applications like NotepadQQ on a lot of distributions, using the default Debian cursor.

The second thing is speed. Snaps are consistently slower to start than Deb packages and even flatpaks. This has been resolved somewhat, but especially in the early days, the included Calculator and System Monitor took literal minutes to load on slow computers. This puzzled me in the early days of my Linux journey back in 2018, where I had a trash-picked thin client that I ran Linux on. Even on higher spec hardware, it still took a good 15 seconds to launch the calculator.

Now, the ugly, starting out with Chromium. The first thing is that no one uses Chromium. Many people think that Chromium is a fake or malicious version of Google Chrome, and while that is untrue, Chromium is still generally not used. Instead, people use Google Chrome, and download it from Google's website. I understand Canonical's reasoning for doing this- the amount of processing time that it takes to compile Chromium- but honestly, Snap is the worst way for Chromium to be distributed, due to its high sandboxing, something that is NOT wanted on a web browser, due to speed and desktop integration. There is also NO POINT in putting a program like VSCode or Skype in a snap because Microsoft compiles a Deb themselves. As far as updates go, automatic updates sound pretty good, but apps cannot be updated while there are running, and in the example of the application GithubDesktop, the snap stopped working (segfaults at startup), making it impossible for users to use the program until an update is released, which in the case was never for the snap, because the developer decided not to support snap anymore (good call).

 So that's my rant about snaps. This might be controversial, but it's my opinion. Leave any comments about this down in the comment section.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

[OUTDATED] Modern Debian Linux on a 1998 PowerBook G3 (Wallstreet) in 2023

-
Image
NOTE: THIS GUIDE IS OUTDATED. IT WILL ONLY WORK WITH OLDER LINUX KERNELS (6.1 and earlier) WHICH ARE NO LONGER IN THE DEBIAN REPOSITORY. I recently got out my 25 year old PowerBook G3 Wallstreet and attempted to install a period accurate Linux distribution on it for a video. This didn't work; the system froze at installing glibc and never finished installing. However, while old Linux wouldn't work on this PowerBook, there was nothing inherently about modern Linux that would make it not work. For this reason, I decided to try Debian PowerPC , a mostly unmaintained yet up-to-date version of Debian unstable for PowerPC Macs. Debian for PowerPC has gone through years-long periods where installation would fail no matter what computer you were using, but with Debian 12, it seems most of the bugs that existed in the past (e.g. boot loader installation failures) have been fixed. Despite it being mostly unmaintained, it works surprisingly well on the Wallstreet despite it being a quart...
Read more

Linux on a MacBook6,1 (White) - Full Documentation

-
Recently, I have been experimenting with Linux on Intel Macs, with the most recent machine being the 2009 A1342 MacBook. This documentation assumes some familiarity with Linux beforehand, and can be used on other MacBooks (specifically models with an NVIDIA card) with some modifications. The specs of my specific machine are as follows: - 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P7550 (Penryn) - 6GB DDR3 (8GB wouldn't work for some reason) - Nvidia Geforce 9400M Graphics - 250GB SSD - Linux Mint 22 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard (dual-booted) Part 0: What works Everything! Well, except for external monitors, which don't work correctly. Most of the hardware works out of the box, but some needs some tweaking to work or to work well. We'll get into that in this article. Part 1: Initial information Pretty much every modern Linux distribution will technically work on this MacBook, however, there are some caveats that you should be aware of: - This documentation (specifically steps related to partitio...
Read more

My thoughts about Apple removing the charger from new devices

-
Image
Source: Unsplash  At the Apple event on September 15, 2020, Apple announced the Apple Watch Series 6 and the Apple Watch SE. These two watches have removed the power adapter from the box of the devices, requiring you to purchace the charger seperately. It's rumored that Apple will take this same action with the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro this year. This is absolutely rediculous BS, and this is why.  Firstly, if Apple does this, then people will likely use their old phone charger with their new phone, which is a problem, because their old charger is likely the 5W charger . If the user uses the 5W charger with their new phone that needs a lot more than 5W, their new phone will trickle charge, and put more stress on their batteries, making their lifespan shorter, and making it so that you have to buy a new phone sooner.  Secondly, and this is related and a lot worse, is people using cheap eBay chargers like these . These are dangerous for you and your phone, yourself, and y...
Read more