1y ago

Why is snaps hated

I see people hate snap packaging and removing it if their OS support it. Is it because it's NOT fully open-source or just due to how the technology works?

Update: fixed typos

87 comments

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.
- I wiped that drive clean and switched to Fedora.
  I might need to switch over as well, but I really don't like rpm (or whatever that's called on fedora, zypper or something? or was that suse?). I've been a Debian user since woody was a new thing and then at some point I gradually moved to ubuntu due to better desktop experience and more up to date packages (back then Debian stable really wasn't anywhere close of bleeding edge) and PPA support was great for my needs. Now I have ubuntu installations which have gone trough upgrades for years and installations I have doesn't seem to work like I want them to. Some of the issues will most likely stay (as RMS said, nvidia rapes babies or something like that) but in general I don't like my browser, signal client and whatnot to notify me that I need to shut them down NOW since they'll upgrade at some point in next 3-6 months. Simple apt dist-upgrade isn't enough anymore and the systems require more and more TLC than I'm willing to give to them. Snapd is at least related to the issues I have 8 times out of 10.
  Ubuntu just doesn't have the feel it used to and it's getting annoying enough that the simpler way would be just to reinstall everything and switch to something else, even if it takes some time and effort to migrate 5+ year old installations to new system.
  
  If you don't want something completely different, PopOS is a great, snap free, distribution based on Ubuntu. It's what Ubuntu should have been.
  
  Maybe LM:DE (Linux Mint: Debian Edition)? Obscure software can be a pain to install for the usual reason, but otherwise I'm finding this to be a great distro. Second choice is Solus, but that's even worse when it comes to software.
  
  Fedora uses DNF, with rpms under the hood, not sure how that works, haha. Honestly I have no problems with it. I'm no power user, but it does everything I need. The only downside being kinda slow repo fetches.
  
  If you want up-to-date packages then just switch to testing
  
  rpms were a pain for me when i transitioned as well but I've learned to love them
- One of my biggest gripes about Windows was updates, virus scans and compatibility scans running autonomously while I am trying to get stuff done, sucking up network, drive access and CPU. I didn't need Ubuntu doing the same thing to me - I want to kick off updates manually when I am taking a break for lunch or at the end of the day before shutdown.
  
  As a power use this drives me nuts, but I know plenty of end users who are better off with those things turned on.
- I actually think jetbrains are the ones keeping old versions. On my windows machine, when I get an ide update, the old one is saved so I can revert back to it.

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
- Makes lsblk look really ugly
  i never even thought of that, it would be an abomination
- Also:
  Creates a snap directory on your home. I hate programs that pollute my home.
  Requires a service (snapd) to function.
  
  Not only does it create that directory but it creates new folders for each updated version of various apps... Very weird and confusing

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
- Didn’t know that about the docker snap but that is insane. It would be straight up unusable at work for me.
- To be fair, those are both issues with flatpak too. You can change the file system permissions with a command or flatseal, but I don't know of a fix for the password extension issue.
  
  In general the integration of flatpak is quite good (even more if we compare it with snap), but there are still some gaps. In this case there are some solutions like this one.
- Install Node with snap? Cypress silently closes. (This took some time to get to the bottom of)
- I tried to get microk8s up and running by installing it from a snap since I figured it would be a nice and easy way to get up and running quickly.
  I’ve spent so much time trying to get it working that I haven’t even started to learn k8s yet since I can’t get the damn thing to run.
  I think I’m switching to Debian for my servers.
  
  Wtf I've installed microk8s dozens of times it just works ?!

Examining my disk partitions with df is ruined now. Every snap gets its own virtual disk.
- Ha I was just listening to the Linux Unplugged podcast and the guy was just complaining about this same thing
- I wonder if that could easily be fixed by just filtering the output of df to not show virtual disks (df already has an -l option to only show local disks, so would expect that changing df could be relatively easy).
  Note: I am not saying that I like snaps...
- It seems incredibly shortsighted to go this way. Sure 1 or 2 is fine, but when the whole os is snaps it's abusing the system.
- This is the reason I got rid of snaps
- Just create an alias that filters loop devices. I mean, if this is your only problem with snap, you can fix it in a second. But I'm betting you have other problems with it.

I don't know enough to dislike snaps, I'm just spiteful enough to dislike cannonical trying to force me to use them
- You're so real for this

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.
- This was the most frustrating for me as well. While I appreciate Snap trying to be a universal installer of sorts, it breaks too often to be useful.
- This was my experience too. Ubuntu asks if I want to install the docker snap, I say sure. I then try to use docker and it's completely unable to do what I need. I then need to figure out how to uninstall the snap and then install docker normally.
  I tried a few snaps, but everytime they were a pain in the ass and I regretted it. Now I avoid them at all costs
  
  Same with Docker. Installed it because Ubuntu recommended it then spent a month trying to figure out why all my docker containers would randomly shutdown and restart themselves. I knew snap auto-installed updates, but had no idea it would do it even if the program was currently running and in use.
- this is exactly my experience
- There is absolutely such a thing as too much sandboxing, and flatpak is already pushing the limit.

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

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.
- Stop the app and run "snap refresh" and it should update anything that's queued
  
  yes, I did kill the process and update the image though snap.
  this did nothing to remove the update notification that cannot be dismissed without rebooting.

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.
- I hear they have improved performance now though
  It's still not great. Better, but still slow enough to make you question whether you've actually launched the app or not.

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?!"
- 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.
  To be fair this is more of an issue with Discord than snap.. Would be understandable if it was an urgent security fix but they do it every time, and then it breaks for everybody who is using anything else than the deb or tar.gz they provide.
  Workaround for Fedora: Edit /usr/lib64/discord/resources/build_info.json and increase the version number to whatever Discord tells you is the new version. And hope that the update wasn't a fix for some remote code execution vulnerability :)

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
- This is such a stupid minor thing, but it's what made me switch from Ubuntu to Fedora, haha.
- Downloads and Documents starting with a capital letter is my biggest pet peeve with Ubuntu. It makes it a lot more annoying to navigate through them than if it was all lower case.

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.

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.
- Same. I end up either grep -v -e tmps and loop mounts or mount -t for each type of physical mount. I suppose lsblk and findmnt might have better options and views.
  
  Lsblk suffers too.

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.

... No, snaps aren't considered too open source as far as I know. For me it's how it's forced on me almost as hard as a Windows upgrade. I'm pretty sure my next linux distro is PopOS, not Ubuntu.

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.

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

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

Not generic as Docker containers, not native as package managers. If I’m trusting an app to install it, then I don’t want to care about security rules.

Because people still believe in one standard to rule them all.

Some of the things that have already been mentioned are true also for me, especially around permissions and assumptions about my system's setup. However what really did it for me was when Firefox stopped recognizing my keyboard after a snap refresh. It's just as if no input device was there for FF anymore. I found reports of the issue, but no solution. In the end I installed from a DEB repository and went through the shenanigans to prevent snap from reinstalling it.

Mostly it has to do with how Canonical owns the snap store. if they made it so anyone could build a snap repo then a lot fewer peopl would have problems

its a scam.
there was this jerk working as an intern at red hat. lennart. he made the decision to break the linux dogma: do one thing and do it good. systemd was born. red hat drools. an important step towarda ending open-ness. later snaps. later closing red hat stream. profit.
if you use systemd or snaps you could just fast forward and use apple.

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