Snaps, Flatpak's, and Hard Drive Space

[Paddy Landau]

Canonical has Ubuntu Core as an immutable OS with Snap packaging providing the containers for the applications.

Ubuntu Core is 100% snap — even the kernel itself!

As an immutable system, you can't easily best that.

That's why Canonical is going with snap, and not using an existing system such as flatpak.

[werewulf75]

I always advise people to get rid of Snap and rely on .deb and in cases flatpaks. Snap is sloooooooooow when you try to use an app that is packaged that way, also snap.d has a great impact on the bootup speed in a negative way.

Snap apps are neither slow here, nor does snap.d seem to have any impact on boot speed. And that's in all three flavours I run here - (vanilla) Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu Unity 22.04, and Ubuntu Mate 22.04.

And my advice to people is and always has been, use whatever works for you from what's available.

[Perfect Storm]

Snap apps are neither slow here, nor does snap.d seem to have any impact on boot speed. And that's in all three flavours I run here - (vanilla) Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu Unity 22.04, and Ubuntu Mate 22.04.

And my advice to people is and always has been, use whatever works for you from what's available.

We have a hoard of people complaining about slowness due to Snap on the Zorin forum (based on Ubuntu 22.04) which where I work as a staff. And by running journalctl shows that Snap is a bottleneck.

[Paddy Landau]

We have a hoard of people complaining about slowness due to Snap on the Zorin forum (based on Ubuntu 22.04) which where I work as a staff. And by running journalctl shows that Snap is a bottleneck.

I don't know if Zorin is a good yardstick. Snap used to be excruciatingly slow to start after a reboot, when Canonical stupidly released it well before it was ready, but that problem has since been solved, and right now it's every bit as fast as flatpak and deb on Ubuntu (I've been using both snap and flatpak for a long time). Maybe Zorin is doing something that slows down snap?

In any case, there's no need to recommend to Ubuntu users to uninstall snap. If they choose not to use snap apps, it just sits there (as with any other app) doing nothing. All that happens is that those people lose out should they want to use snap in future, e.g. for Ubuntu Pro (which I believe is available with Zorin) or the few apps that are unavailable anywhere else (e.g. Adobe Reader).

[Perfect Storm]

I don't know if Zorin is a good yardstick. Snap used to be excruciatingly slow to start after a reboot, when Canonical stupidly released it well before it was ready, but that problem has since been solved, and right now it's every bit as fast as flatpak and deb on Ubuntu (I've been using both snap and flatpak for a long time). Maybe Zorin is doing something that slows down snap?

In any case, there's no need to recommend to Ubuntu users to uninstall snap. If they choose not to use snap apps, it just sits there (as with any other app) doing nothing. All that happens is that those people lose out should they want to use snap in future, e.g. for Ubuntu Pro (which I believe is available with Zorin) or the few apps that are unavailable anywhere else (e.g. Adobe Reader).

Personally I can't say as I don't use Snap, but when users reports back why the bootup is slow, we ask them to run some tests. But good if the slowness is solved. On zorin OS both flatpak and snap repositories are enable, so people can choose - but the problem which OP addressed is still real, both flat and snap requires insanely amount of space and newcomers from Windows can't understand why the 256GB SSD is full especially when they use both snap and flat at the same time, but that's a Zorin problem. So my advice to Zorin users on our board is to get rid snap ... well in most cases I ask if they use it at all, same goes to flat.

Now from an artists perspective; I really loath that snap apps icons is un-themable. Canonical should really change that.


Note: I'm using Pop OS where there's only flat enabled.

[Paddy Landau]

… both flat and snap requires insanely amount of space and newcomers from Windows can't understand why the 256GB SSD is full

The extra space is a result of the fact that they have to duplicate software to prevent dependency hell, and to sandbox the dependencies. There's no way around that with snap, flatpak, AppImage and the like. The price you pay for reliability and easy updatability is increased space.

It must be stated that Ubuntu is aimed primarily at organisations that can afford modern computers. Ubuntu really isn't the best choice for someone with an old machine with only 256 GB — you could try Xubuntu or, for severe cases, Lubuntu for those machines. Having said that, I have a 500 GB SSD containing everything including the UEFI partition, the boot partition, my home partition, all my photos and home videos, and I've installed a lot of snaps and flatpaks as well as debs. Even so, less than a third of the space has been used.

[Perfect Storm]

Just because you and I can afford good hardware, we see a lot of poor people with secondhand computers which have more than 10 years on their backs. It's not uncommon we see people running out of space.

and here I thought Ubuntu was for the people. I guess Canonical is just another faceless cooperation. It surely has changed since then.
Other than that we can agree on disagreeing on this matter.

[Paddy Landau]

Just because you and I can afford good hardware, we see a lot of poor people with secondhand computers which have more than 10 years on their backs. It's not uncommon we see people running out of space.

and here I thought Ubuntu was for the people. I guess Canonical is just another faceless cooperation. It surely has changed since then.
Other than that we can agree on disagreeing on this matter.

If you have an older computer and still want to stick with the Ubuntu environment, it's best to go to Lubuntu. That has rescued quite a few old computers in my time.

If the computer is too old even for that, try Debian.

[TenPlus1]

@paddy - I've found that Bodhi Linux 7.0 works really well on older systems and is based on ubuntu 22.04 with a separate debian release as well just incase.

[Paddy Landau]

@paddy - I've found that Bodhi Linux 7.0 works really well on older systems and is based on ubuntu 22.04 with a separate debian release as well just incase.

Bodhi is good, and although it's based on Ubuntu, it isn't an official derivative. But, it's fine to use; it has a low footprint, even lower than Lubuntu. I still supports 32-bit, but I don't know for how long that will last. It would be interesting to know how many 32-bit systems using Linux are still in use worldwide.