from bunitor@lemmy.eco.br to linux@lemmy.ml on 07 Oct 16:10
https://lemmy.eco.br/post/17198071
i run debian 13 on my laptop. it runs on a 5200rpm hard disk, so some bootup slowdown is to be expected, but it got really bad for some reason. booting up could take up to 3 minutes just to get to the display manager
after running systemd-analyze blame i found the two main culprits: docker and snapd. i had snapd and flatpak installed so that i could have access to as many applications as i could, but it seems that snaps have a huge amount of overhead. i knew about the one million mountpoints caused by snaps, but the amount of services they have to start on boot surprised me. snapd alone took 30 seconds to start and then there were its dependencies
my boot time is now down to 1min 50s. i recommend anyone who still has snapd installed on a non-ubuntu distro to uninstall it
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Honest question, what are you using that is only available from snap?
Snap is almost universally despised with host, flatpack and appimage usually being preferred.
Canonical, being demons, have Snapified things like GNOME, so even your desktop environment will be encumbered by that dogshit packaging format.
Do not use Ubuntu if you value your time and well-being.
i’m not doubting anything after i heard they snapified kernel modules
They’ve snapified coreutils too, and rewritten them in rust (uutils). It’s proving to be a challenging transition…
Edit: While the article mentions rust’s vaunted memory safety as a driver, I can’t help but notice that uutils is licensed MIT, as opposed to GNU’s coreutils license being GPL v3.
While snapd is licensed GPL v3, it’s important to note that despite the ‘d’ suffix, it’s barely a daemon. It’s mostly a client for the snap backend - which is proprietarially licensed and only hosted with Canonical. The snapd client could be replaced at any time.
Why?
Because their sandboxing format subtly breaks so many applications (more than flatpak) and Canonical very nefariously co-opts your
apt install <package>with a deb package that’s actually a stub to install the Snap version, so when your shit breaks, you can waste hours before you realize that they fucked your installation.Beyond that, Snap cold start times (installations or updates) are slow as shit (yes, even with LZO compression), and since each snap application can update on its own, you’ll also encounter random times when your shit appears to “freeze” but what’s actually happening is Canonical is busy polluting your loopback devices to decompress their shittified version of your app.
the official slack package for linux is a snap. the flatpak one is not official and it has a number of issues, especially on wayland. luckly, there’s also a beta deb package available, so i’m using that
but i believe snap will only become less able to compete with flatpak as time passes
From a security and os build perspective, they’re all absolutely horrific.
Snap turned several of my oldest Ubuntu boxes into unuseable e-waste before I jumped to a different distribution. This is the sole reason that I left Ubuntu behind back in the day and switched to something else on ALL of my computers. I’m not going through that again.