Linux

Here’s my answer to this same question from an old thread on Reddit:

My Ubuntu system always reserved a whopping 20% of my 32GB ram for no reason and I never bothered to know why. Later I uninstalled snapd because of boot time issues and guess what happened? Only 1.5 GB used after a fresh boot.

I had like 4 different JetBrains IDEs installed via snap with each totalling around 2GB of disk space. While removing snapd I discovered it kept back 2-3 previous versions of every package on your disk.

Uninstalling this bloat was the best thing I did to my ubuntu system. It was suddenly light as a feather and way more responsive like I just did a fresh system install.

Some time later I was installing something from apt and Ubuntu tried to install it from snap, thus sneakily installing snapd in the process. Looking for a solution, I felt like I was looking up how to disable Windows updates or some other shit.

I had a moment of clarity and wondered why the fuck did I have to put up with this kinda bullshit on Linux. I wiped that drive clean and switched to Fedora.

There are philosophical and technical reasons to not like snaps

Technical

• Slow startup time
• Makes lsblk look really ugly
• For awhile users didn't have a lot of control over when things updated
• Not designed to work with third party repos by default
• Requires apparmor so it doesn't work well on selinux distros.

Philosophical

• Backend is proprietary and controller by a single company
• Has made the same amount of effort as flatpak to work on distros that aren't Ubuntu
• Some people just don't like Ubuntu

This threads got lots of good answers, but I haven't seen it mentioned that snaps sometimes mean reduced functionality.

Use the docker snap? Sorry, it can only access your home directory so no -v /some/path:/somewhere for you

Use firefox or chromium and keepassxc? Sorry, your browser plugin won't be able to talk to your password manager

And the updates.... dear god. In whose mind was it a good idea to show a "firefox is updating, exit now to avoid issues" TWO WEEKS im advance. Closing the app does precisely fuck all unless you manually snap refresh it

Containerised applications are a fine idea, but snap is a horrible implementation of it

Linux Mint's criticism of snap. Mint is based on Ubuntu.

Examining my disk partitions with df is ruined now. Every snap gets its own virtual disk.

I don't know enough to dislike snaps, I'm just spiteful enough to dislike cannonical trying to force me to use them

Perhaps it's been fixed since, but a this type of thing was the main issue with snaps to me:

"Why can't the program see the printer? Ubuntu can see the printer"

"Why can't I save to this USB pen? It can't even see it"

"These two programs are meant to work together, but they can't see each other"

"I can't open my project from my external drive"

"It won't let me import the photos from my camera. It can't see the camera"

Would have been less of an issue if they had an android-style permissions pop-up with each incident, but snaps just left you silently failing.

Because I can't dismiss the Firefox update notification, no matter how many times I update it.

I've had to reboot every time.

Which, way to go you've reimplemented windows xp era updates.

I remember when the snap version of calculator took like 12 seconds to launch and Canonical were like "yeah but what's the big deal?".

It basically turns your super fast Linux into feeling like a 10 year old windows machine.

I hear they have improved performance now though but there are many other reasons why snap suck.

Along with the other comments, imagine if people started to say, "I like Linux but it's too slow and bloated, so I upgraded to Windows 11."

At best it works more or less the same as an ordinary package. It only gets worse from there.

Several times I've been stuck on a broken version of Discord because on the server side they force an update to the new client, and the new client has not been packaged as a Snap yet.

Getting native hosts to work in Firefox is possible, but a giant pain in the butt.

Basically anything that needs filesystem access is unreasonably troublesome. I gave up on getting Snaps to work with my external drives.

There is simply no scenario where I think "wow, I sure am glad this was packaged as a Snap!" There have been many scenarios where I thought "god dammit why is this a Snap?!"

because the snap folder in your home directory by default starts with a lowercase letter while all the other folders start with uppercase (hidden folders don't count)

all other reasons are secondary

Snaps have centralized control. Canonical has to approve a snap package. Flatpak is like most of Linux. Anyone can make a Flatpak. Also, in my experience, Snaps had a lot of issues early on that were not present in Flatpaks. Now, Flatpak dominates and Snaps kinda feel like a irrelevant runner in a race long after the officials closed competition packed it up and went home.

Short answer: Canonical is strong arming Ubuntu flavors into removing support for alternatives to snap (that run better and do the same thing). These types of decisions are generally worse for the overall Linux community.

Right now, a part of the Linux and Open Source communities are distancing themselves from corporate-sponsored projects given issues we've recently seen with RedHat's CentOS and Canonical's decisions with Snap and LXD

Snap is not fully open source. It's slower than flatpak, it's centralized to Canonical's servers.Flatpaks so not update by default where snaps do, so if a feature breaking update is released and you haven't disabled automatic updates, you're screwed with snap. Flatpak does not need admin privileges where snaps do.

Hmmm, can we just sticky a "snaps are bad" thread? I like to see activity but this same question keeps getting asked.

Also sticky Red Hat's "response", it should deter most of the neolibs.

Bloat and coersion from canonical when using Ubuntu.

Also I hate typing mount on my home machine and sifting through a sea of mountpoints.

Had a low end laptop, i believe it was lubuntu that i installed because i knew ubuntu was too bloated for that laptop. However I was not aware that it used snap and running firefox kick started the fans on that old laptop. Resouce hog seen and searching for firefox direct binary from apt seemed like a chore so i replaced with mint. Snaps automatically i did not want to deal with for old computers. Was happy with mints removal of snaps and it is very user friendly.

Canonical has a history of ignoring established practices and established software projects in the FOSS community and instead rolling their own in-house competitor behind CLA licensing agreements that make it hard for community developers to contribute. It feels like an embrace-extend-extinguish situation to me. They did it with Unity (replacing GNOME 3), Mir (replacing Wayland), and now Snap (replacing Flatpak). There are also technical reasons why many Linux users don't want these userspace/sandboxed packages (Flatpak and AppImage included) taking over the position formerly occupied by native distribution packages (.deb, .rpm, pacman, apk, etc) because of issues with unnecessary copies of dependencies and poor integration with the rest of the system. These concerns apply to Snap as well, and Ubuntu has been pushing to replace .deb packages with snaps.

On a less philosophical note, I find it immensely annoying how Snap creates mounts for its apps bc of how it clutters up disk management tools