11 ms·

Snap was neat when I first discovered it. I could get some bleeding-edge dependencies automatically delivered to my machine, without building it from source or

Snap was neat when I first discovered it. I could get some bleeding-edge dependencies automatically delivered to my machine, without building it from source or having to manually update it. Wonderful! But the problem is: it's the slowest thing in the world. I've complained about this on HN before, but it can be hundreds of milliseconds from when you type a command to when the actual application starts running -- the intermediate time is being consumed by Snap doing god knows what. The slowness is a dealbreaker for me. My disk can read 500,000 4k blocks per second. My RAM can do 3400M transactions per second. I have 32 CPU cores. How is loading some bytes into RAM and telling the CPU to start executing instructions something that can take more than a few microseconds!? Easy: run that app with Snap! I blew up my Ubuntu install and switched back to Debian. I haven't missed Ubuntu at all. I am resigned to the fact that if I care about a particular piece of software because it's the reason I use a computer (go, Emacs, Node, etc.) then I just have to maintain it myself. There simply isn't a good way right now. And you know what? It's fine. Everything is configured exactly the way I like, and it will never change unless I change it.

codethief 6y ago
> But the problem is: it's the slowest thing in the world. Exactly. I recently had to replace Chromium with Google Chrome just because the Ubuntu maintainers thought it'd be a good idea to replace the Chromium apt package with an installer that pulls in the snap… Good thing Firefox is my main browser and I only use Chromium/Chrome for testing (and whenever websites forget that there's more than just one browser to test for), otherwise I would have long ditched Ubuntu, too.
- dessant 6y ago
  I've been getting bug reports for a browser extension because of Snap. The file system isolation of Snap and Flatpak breaks Native Messaging, so extensions that need to communicate with a local app, such as password managers, are now broken. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+bug/1741074 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+...
  - codethief 6y ago
    I had totally forgotten about this! For me it wasn't just the extensions. The font in the "Save Download As…" dialog in the Chromium snap, for instance, has been completely broken for me – all characters get displayed as the infamous glyph-not-found block. To make things worse, the dialog by default suggests some random directory deep inside the snap tree as download destination. Good luck navigating to a folder where you'll find your download again, given that you can't read any of the file or folder names…
    - rbanffy 6y ago
      I'm not a fan of Snap, but I'm surprised something like this font issue passed QA.
      - rrdharan 6y ago
        I think you overestimate the amount of QA resources available to the Ubuntu project. Looks like this was an issue that only happened after repeated use and seems somewhat related to individual systems' font configurations? There's more info here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+bug/1864365 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+...
        rbanffy 6y ago
        I hope they conduct automated testing with screengrabs for high profile apps such as Chromium (that have something to gain from the snap isolation) and that the test cases have this added.
        jlgaddis 6y ago
        > I think you overestimate the amount of QA resources available to the Ubuntu project. s/available to/allocated by/ I don't know that Canonical cares too much about doing QA themselves. It seems like they've decided to delegate that to the userbase.
    - berkes 6y ago
- simlevesque 6y ago
  oh my that THAT is why it takes over 5 seconds to start chromium on my Xeon...
  - evmar 6y ago
    That is really disappointing to read. We put a lot of effort into making Chrome start quickly. Back when I was responsible for Linux Chrome, I gave a lighting talk at the Ubuntu Developer Summit about it, and demoed Chrome starting faster than Gnome Calculator.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - owl57 6y ago
      Not being snarky towards you — Chrome starts really quickly — but was that the snapped calculator from Ubuntu 18.04?
    - simlevesque 6y ago
      firefox from the ubuntu repository is over 5 times faster to start. on any windows machine, it's almost the opposite. sorry to break the news. for what it's worth I still use it everyday... I usually start my browser once a day so it's not that big of a difference.
      - philliphaydon 6y ago
        Both chrome and Firefox on Ubuntu are basically instant for me. Chrome is installed without the snap rubbish tho.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - mad182 6y ago
      Hats off, Chrome starts instantly on my Debian machines. Even on a 10 years old, half dead Thinkpad it's just couple of seconds. This must be a Ubuntu/Snap specific issue.
- volsa_ 6y ago
  I have been using the snap versions of Chromium, Discord, CLion and Spotify for a while now and I haven't noticed any slowness whatsoever. Sure the applications need some seconds (at most 5) to start up on a freshly booted machine but other than that it's pretty snappy (heh). The only issue I have encountered so far is that some applications don't respect the environments cursor theme (looking at you Spotify and Postman) but that's easily fixable by the package maintainers. Other than that I really don't understand the hate-train for snap. Coming from Arch Linux, PPAs seem like a PITA to me and an elegant solution such as the AUR doesn't exist in the Ubuntu ecosystem so snap / flatpak are the next closest thing to it.
  - readams 6y ago
    The 5 second load time is exactly the slowness people are complaining about. It's a ~100x slowdown.
  - quadrifoliate 6y ago
    Most applications on Macs start up instantaneously these days. 5 seconds is 50 times the limit for "instantaneous" feel. [1] All of the raging discussions in this thread would be totally absent if Canonical had taken the time to make apps installed with snaps fast. Unfortunately, these days, the "make it work, make it right, make it fast" mantra seems to stop at the "make it work". At least the 20.04 release seems to be at that stage. Congratulations, you just got a bunch of users who are going to avoid updates even more because you are going to make everything slower with your shiny new release. ------------------- [1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/response-times-3-important-limits/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/response-times-3-important-...
    - sroussey 6y ago
      No, most apps are slow the first time they are run on Mac (not as bad as first run of snap though, usually). After that, pretty fast. AppStore apps seem to always be fast.
  - monkpit 6y ago
    > Coming from Arch Linux Genuinely curious, why would you not just keep using Arch?
ben-schaaf 6y ago
At one point Ubuntu had lots of their built-in apps on snap. I distinctly remember firefox starting seconds faster than the simple calculator or system monitor apps.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  Indeed. That the calculator takes longer to start than Firefox should have caused the project to be abandoned. I see the value of file system and dependency isolation, but it shouldn't result in such significantly degraded performance.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    Or at least a hard stop on migrations until the performance characteristics were hashed out. Sadly I noticed a while ago that Windows began to outrun Ubuntu on my older machines; it doesn’t seem like Canonical really cares about performance anymore.
    - rbanffy 6y ago
      I'm surprised Mark Shuttleworth allowed that. He has a very low tolerance to mistakes.
      - tuatoru 6y ago
        To me, Ubuntu's glory days were with 10.04. It seemed much more polished than the alternatives at that time. IIRC Shuttleworth took a more governance and less hands-on role after that, and Ubuntu started to focus on server and enterprise support.
        rbanffy 6y ago
        I saw him tearing people down in 2015-ish. And for much less than this.
ljm 6y ago
I was settling up WSL2 the other day and needed Chrome so I could run it headless for some E2E tests I had going. It took a lot of messing about to get a copy of it that didn't use Snap. Partly because apt has always worked great for me and I didn't want to switch with something else, but also because it required systemd to run it as a daemon? That they clobbered the apt install just to push Snap forward left a bad taste in my mouth.
- ripdog 6y ago
  It's worth noting that you can use Arch and various other distros on wsl[2], not just Ubuntu.
  - sergeykish 6y ago
    It is not official, like with AUR check sources http://archlinux.2023198.n4.nabble.com/Windows-Subsystem-Linux-Arch-Linux-as-official-container-td4718272.html http://archlinux.2023198.n4.nabble.com/Windows-Subsystem-Lin...
    - voxic11 6y ago
      You can officially use any official image on WSL2 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/build-custom-distro https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/build-custom-di...
- philliphaydon 6y ago
  I don’t understand why it’s so hard. It’s literally visit chrome website and download the deb file and install...
ufmace 6y ago
About the slowness - is it just on launch, or does it keep being slow if the app keeps running? A few hundred ms is indeed a deal-breaker for standard Unix-y CLI app that might be chained with 5 other simple apps. It doesn't seem like a big deal though if you're launching something like Chromium that you might normally leave running for weeks.
- simcop2387 6y ago
  The problem is that if you use chromium in any automated testing suite, it can get restarted after each test making a test suite take much longer to run.
- IshKebab 6y ago
  It's still pretty bad even for GUI apps. Do you really want to add 0.3s to the startup time of Chrome? I would definitely notice that.
  - Chyzwar 6y ago
    Chrome use deb. Also, I do not remember last time I closed chrome. I can remember my whole system breaking because of ppa hell.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  have you tried chromium on Ubuntu? It takes several seconds, maybe 10 on my machine whereas firefox loads in under a second.
- vladvasiliu 6y ago
  For me it's just on launch. More precisely, the period before the application actually starts to launch. I guess it has something to do with mounting the various file systems and setting up the connections or whatever it is that it does. I've had to install Chrome to try a thing or too (so not as a daily driver) and I haven't noticed anything weird during use. I've used Jetbrains' PyCharm daily for a few months and no problem there either (although that is a "classic" snap, not sure if it matters).
igor47 6y ago
Not sure about Emacs, but node and go can be maintained with `asdf`
WD-42 6y ago
> I care about a particular piece of software because it's the reason I use a computer (go, Emacs, Node, etc.) then I just have to maintain it myself. There simply isn't a good way right now. Don’t do this to yourself! Debian is not going to give you bleeding edge. But there are plenty of distros that can. Despite being a meme, Arch Linux is one of the best distros available, and has been for years. Node, golang, are usually updated within hours of upstream, while the core system remains stable. If you’re looking for something more modern, Solus has been gaining popularity and also has relatively up to date packages. Debian is great for servers.
- kelchm 6y ago
  Manjaro is a really great option too, if you want something Arch flavored that’s a bit more user friendly.
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    Yeah I've used it for a while with no issues. on my "living on the edge" machine. I still stick with ubuntu for my daily drivers. I don't understand the rant though. I understand why they moved chromium to snap.
  - SweetestRug 6y ago
    Definitely this. Manjaro is out-of-the-box ready, but based on Arch. Manjaro stable is also two more testing steps away from Arch, so the packages are less likely to cause issues. And there are four sources for software: Manjaro repos, the AUR, flatpacks, and snaps. I have never been in a situation where I could not install the latest software via one of those routes. I ran Debian for years and often ran into situations where new software was just not installable due to library incompatibility, etc. Manjaro feels like a Swiss Army knife in comparison.
    - narwally 6y ago
      And with all the options you'll almost never have to rely on snaps.
  - 6y ago
psanford 6y ago
I've started to use nix (both nixos and nix installed on ubuntu) to manage those critical packages where I want both control and the option for major updates outside the OS's release cadence.
- narwally 6y ago
  I tried nix on Ubuntu recently so that I could get an up-to-date, non-snap emacs (if you already think emacs is slow to load, you should see it as a snap), and the resulting build was giving me all kinds of issues, even with just the vanilla config. I tried one other package and had issues there as well. I ended up just compiling both from source and they worked perfectly. Is there anything special about getting nix working well with other package managers? I'll be honest, the main thing keeping me from digging into it further are the docs and the syntax. I can never tell if I'm reading about nix-the-package-manager, nix-the-language, or nix-the-operating-system; and looking at the syntax makes me understand what most programmers feel when they look at lisp.
  - psanford 6y ago
    Yeah the syntax is intimidating. Its definitely one of those things where its easier to start off by copying examples and then slowly learn all the details. After using it for a while it mostly starts to feel like a slightly different JSON syntax (there are a few exceptions to this but you don't end up needing that for most of what you do). Sorry to hear you had issues on ubuntu. Its hard to say how you might improve your experience without knowing more details. The nix forum is probably a good place to get support for that sort of thing.
    - narwally 6y ago
      I'm sure I could track down the issue, I just didn't have the time. I was just hoping to use it to install a more up-to-date package here and there just to dip my toes in the water and go from there. I really like the idea behind it, and hope it or something similar catches on. I may just have to throw myself into the deep end and try NixOS out in a vm.
stefan_ 6y ago
I think the last time the startup issue came up on HN we concluded it was because they are mounting a squashfs filesystem image that was created with the compression turned up to 11, and not using the kind of compression algorithm that is only slow on compression. That and the general terribleness of squashfs. Now keep in mind we can't blame squashfs here. It was developed for use on <16 MiB large NOR flash chips for embedded devices likely connected over SPI - the underlying flash and interface is so unbelievably slow that no amount of compression or terrible kernel code would ever start showing up in some kind of benchmark. Using it on super fast desktop machines with storage that rivals RAM bandwidth and latency is just the opposite of what it was developed for.
- mehrdadn 6y ago
  Is there any replacement for squashfs? I don't know of any other format on Linux that captures the state of the file system as fully as squashfs.
  - gdm85 6y ago
    See https://ewh.ieee.org/r4/se_michigan/cs/20131019/A%20Comparative%20Analaysis%20Between%20Embedded%20Linux%20File%20Systems_old_format.pdf https://ewh.ieee.org/r4/se_michigan/cs/20131019/A%20Comparat...
  - labawi 6y ago
    Squashfs is not a problem. Squashfs can be faster than ext4, sometimes many times faster (lots of small files). Selected squashfs parameters are the speed issue.
- SahAssar 6y ago
  From my experience squashfs can give quite okay perf if you use the right params and compression. I'd expect one of the largest linux distos to tune those params correctly.
  - justsid 6y ago
    Is “quite okay perf” really the goal post though? Using applications is what makes a computer useful. It’s bad enough that applications these days are terribly slow and inefficient to begin with, I don’t want even more unnecessary slow downs on top of that.
giancarlostoro 6y ago
I know Snap isolates dependencies... But does it share them if they are common at all? I think this would make the sweet spot...
podgaj 6y ago
Debian Stable is the last great linux distro. I keep trying to go back to Fedora or Ubuntu but they are so damn buggy. And as someone living with OCD (the real thing) the whole Snap thing just makes me so anxious. And like you experienced, it is soooo slow. I cannot even go back to windows because for some reason the wifi on my laptop does not work well with it. I do not care about bleeding edge anymore, but I am a casual user mostly doing genetic research, so Debian Buster with Cinnamon is, to me, the best distro on Linux today.
- wyclif 6y ago
  Debian Sid is also a great option for people who used to be into the bleeding edge Linux distro scene but can settle for Debian's more conservative version of it.
  - clankyclanker 6y ago
    In my dotage, I’ve come to appreciate the Debian Stable cadence: I can just set it and forget it for a year at a time. The mostly-annual upgrades have saved me so much time; everything just works in concert for long stretches of stability.
  - dabockster 6y ago
    I've been loving Pop OS! lately. It feels like a "what if" version of Ubuntu had they not spent years pushing Unity, Snap, and their other side projects and just focused on the distro. Super responsive and easy to use, regardless of if you're using free or proprietary software.
gdm85 6y ago
> I blew up my Ubuntu install and switched back to Debian. I haven't missed Ubuntu at all. What are the biggest drawbacks? I know you said you don't miss Ubuntu at all, but is there anything which is causing you pain because it works differently or is just missing?
Thorentis 6y ago
Honestly, try out Linux Mint. I'm on 19.3 and it's the best OS I've ever used. Convinience of Ubuntu repos and ease of use, no Snap, some fantastic QoL widgets and apps developed for it, a great DE (well, you can choose multiple DEs but I love Cinnamon). If you want a Debian package base you can even get LMDE (Linux Mint Debian addition) which has all the perks of LM, but based on Debian instead.
- dabockster 6y ago
  I want to like Linux Mint but their Cinnamon DE still breaks stuff occasionally that expects either pure GNOME or Unity. Probably the devs' faults for hardcoding it to those two DEs, but still.
hkt 6y ago
I switched from Debian to Manjaro after seventeen years this summer. The Arch-isms are odd at first but it is an enormous pleasure to have a system that is up to date, stable, and works with me instead of against me. That and brew for Linux (which is very rarely needed on Manjaro) has vastly improved my user experience. Doesn't address all of what you said, but hope this is useful.
incompatible 6y ago
I also abandoned Ubuntu, and after various adventures in distro land I now use Debian Testing with Xfce.
- weka 6y ago
  I am currently using Ubuntu 20.04 with the Sabrent Rocket M.2 SSD and AMD Ryzen 3900x and several times my OS continiously locks up some programs for a short time (Chrome, Firefox, etc.) or becomes really slow. This computer I built is relatively new and used for work mostly so I am not sure if it's Ubuntu or I downloaded a stray snap package but man I have noticed Snap packages can be ... slow. I used Debian and it seems to be gaining detractors from Ubuntu, my only question is... what made you switch and sick with Debian?
  - incompatible 6y ago
    I suppose I'm used to apt-based systems, although I don't know if it really makes any difference. So many other distros are based on Debian, but often it seems like a pretty thin layer, perhaps poorly maintained, over Debian itself. Debian seems to have so many more developers, so why not just use it directly. The rough edges I've found: no automatic updater or security updates in testing, just run apt update/upgrade once a day. An initial problem with the video driver not working because it requires non-free firmware, solution is just to add Debian non-free (it would have been helpful if a warning was given during installation). Firefox/thunderbird still on an old long-term-service release: I've been installing tarballs manually for now.
cjauvin 6y ago
Ah I'm glad to finally understand why Emacs 27 starts so slowly: I installed it as a snap (while my Emacs 26 was from a PPA), and I spent a great deal of time trying to find what was the culprit in my init.el config, to no avail.

codethief 6y ago

> But the problem is: it's the slowest thing in the world. Exactly. I recently had to replace Chromium with Google Chrome just because the Ubuntu maintainers thought it'd be a good idea to replace the Chromium apt package with an installer that pulls in the snap… Good thing Firefox is my main browser and I only use Chromium/Chrome for testing (and whenever websites forget that there's more than just one browser to test for), otherwise I would have long ditched Ubuntu, too.

dessant 6y ago
I've been getting bug reports for a browser extension because of Snap. The file system isolation of Snap and Flatpak breaks Native Messaging, so extensions that need to communicate with a local app, such as password managers, are now broken. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+bug/1741074 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+...
- codethief 6y ago
  I had totally forgotten about this! For me it wasn't just the extensions. The font in the "Save Download As…" dialog in the Chromium snap, for instance, has been completely broken for me – all characters get displayed as the infamous glyph-not-found block. To make things worse, the dialog by default suggests some random directory deep inside the snap tree as download destination. Good luck navigating to a folder where you'll find your download again, given that you can't read any of the file or folder names…
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    I'm not a fan of Snap, but I'm surprised something like this font issue passed QA.
    - rrdharan 6y ago
      I think you overestimate the amount of QA resources available to the Ubuntu project. Looks like this was an issue that only happened after repeated use and seems somewhat related to individual systems' font configurations? There's more info here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+bug/1864365 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+...
      - rbanffy 6y ago
        I hope they conduct automated testing with screengrabs for high profile apps such as Chromium (that have something to gain from the snap isolation) and that the test cases have this added.
      - jlgaddis 6y ago
        > I think you overestimate the amount of QA resources available to the Ubuntu project. s/available to/allocated by/ I don't know that Canonical cares too much about doing QA themselves. It seems like they've decided to delegate that to the userbase.
  - berkes 6y ago
simlevesque 6y ago
oh my that THAT is why it takes over 5 seconds to start chromium on my Xeon...
- evmar 6y ago
  That is really disappointing to read. We put a lot of effort into making Chrome start quickly. Back when I was responsible for Linux Chrome, I gave a lighting talk at the Ubuntu Developer Summit about it, and demoed Chrome starting faster than Gnome Calculator.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - owl57 6y ago
    Not being snarky towards you — Chrome starts really quickly — but was that the snapped calculator from Ubuntu 18.04?
  - simlevesque 6y ago
    firefox from the ubuntu repository is over 5 times faster to start. on any windows machine, it's almost the opposite. sorry to break the news. for what it's worth I still use it everyday... I usually start my browser once a day so it's not that big of a difference.
    - philliphaydon 6y ago
      Both chrome and Firefox on Ubuntu are basically instant for me. Chrome is installed without the snap rubbish tho.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - mad182 6y ago
    Hats off, Chrome starts instantly on my Debian machines. Even on a 10 years old, half dead Thinkpad it's just couple of seconds. This must be a Ubuntu/Snap specific issue.
volsa_ 6y ago
I have been using the snap versions of Chromium, Discord, CLion and Spotify for a while now and I haven't noticed any slowness whatsoever. Sure the applications need some seconds (at most 5) to start up on a freshly booted machine but other than that it's pretty snappy (heh). The only issue I have encountered so far is that some applications don't respect the environments cursor theme (looking at you Spotify and Postman) but that's easily fixable by the package maintainers. Other than that I really don't understand the hate-train for snap. Coming from Arch Linux, PPAs seem like a PITA to me and an elegant solution such as the AUR doesn't exist in the Ubuntu ecosystem so snap / flatpak are the next closest thing to it.
- readams 6y ago
  The 5 second load time is exactly the slowness people are complaining about. It's a ~100x slowdown.
- quadrifoliate 6y ago
  Most applications on Macs start up instantaneously these days. 5 seconds is 50 times the limit for "instantaneous" feel. [1] All of the raging discussions in this thread would be totally absent if Canonical had taken the time to make apps installed with snaps fast. Unfortunately, these days, the "make it work, make it right, make it fast" mantra seems to stop at the "make it work". At least the 20.04 release seems to be at that stage. Congratulations, you just got a bunch of users who are going to avoid updates even more because you are going to make everything slower with your shiny new release. ------------------- [1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/response-times-3-important-limits/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/response-times-3-important-...
  - sroussey 6y ago
    No, most apps are slow the first time they are run on Mac (not as bad as first run of snap though, usually). After that, pretty fast. AppStore apps seem to always be fast.
- monkpit 6y ago
  > Coming from Arch Linux Genuinely curious, why would you not just keep using Arch?

ben-schaaf 6y ago

At one point Ubuntu had lots of their built-in apps on snap. I distinctly remember firefox starting seconds faster than the simple calculator or system monitor apps.

rbanffy 6y ago
Indeed. That the calculator takes longer to start than Firefox should have caused the project to be abandoned. I see the value of file system and dependency isolation, but it shouldn't result in such significantly degraded performance.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Or at least a hard stop on migrations until the performance characteristics were hashed out. Sadly I noticed a while ago that Windows began to outrun Ubuntu on my older machines; it doesn’t seem like Canonical really cares about performance anymore.
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    I'm surprised Mark Shuttleworth allowed that. He has a very low tolerance to mistakes.
    - tuatoru 6y ago
      To me, Ubuntu's glory days were with 10.04. It seemed much more polished than the alternatives at that time. IIRC Shuttleworth took a more governance and less hands-on role after that, and Ubuntu started to focus on server and enterprise support.
      - rbanffy 6y ago
        I saw him tearing people down in 2015-ish. And for much less than this.

ljm 6y ago

I was settling up WSL2 the other day and needed Chrome so I could run it headless for some E2E tests I had going. It took a lot of messing about to get a copy of it that didn't use Snap. Partly because apt has always worked great for me and I didn't want to switch with something else, but also because it required systemd to run it as a daemon? That they clobbered the apt install just to push Snap forward left a bad taste in my mouth.

ripdog 6y ago
It's worth noting that you can use Arch and various other distros on wsl[2], not just Ubuntu.
- sergeykish 6y ago
  It is not official, like with AUR check sources http://archlinux.2023198.n4.nabble.com/Windows-Subsystem-Linux-Arch-Linux-as-official-container-td4718272.html http://archlinux.2023198.n4.nabble.com/Windows-Subsystem-Lin...
  - voxic11 6y ago
    You can officially use any official image on WSL2 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/build-custom-distro https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/build-custom-di...
philliphaydon 6y ago
I don’t understand why it’s so hard. It’s literally visit chrome website and download the deb file and install...

ufmace 6y ago

About the slowness - is it just on launch, or does it keep being slow if the app keeps running? A few hundred ms is indeed a deal-breaker for standard Unix-y CLI app that might be chained with 5 other simple apps. It doesn't seem like a big deal though if you're launching something like Chromium that you might normally leave running for weeks.

simcop2387 6y ago
The problem is that if you use chromium in any automated testing suite, it can get restarted after each test making a test suite take much longer to run.
IshKebab 6y ago
It's still pretty bad even for GUI apps. Do you really want to add 0.3s to the startup time of Chrome? I would definitely notice that.
- Chyzwar 6y ago
  Chrome use deb. Also, I do not remember last time I closed chrome. I can remember my whole system breaking because of ppa hell.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
have you tried chromium on Ubuntu? It takes several seconds, maybe 10 on my machine whereas firefox loads in under a second.
vladvasiliu 6y ago
For me it's just on launch. More precisely, the period before the application actually starts to launch. I guess it has something to do with mounting the various file systems and setting up the connections or whatever it is that it does. I've had to install Chrome to try a thing or too (so not as a daily driver) and I haven't noticed anything weird during use. I've used Jetbrains' PyCharm daily for a few months and no problem there either (although that is a "classic" snap, not sure if it matters).

igor47 6y ago

Not sure about Emacs, but node and go can be maintained with `asdf`

WD-42 6y ago

> I care about a particular piece of software because it's the reason I use a computer (go, Emacs, Node, etc.) then I just have to maintain it myself. There simply isn't a good way right now. Don’t do this to yourself! Debian is not going to give you bleeding edge. But there are plenty of distros that can. Despite being a meme, Arch Linux is one of the best distros available, and has been for years. Node, golang, are usually updated within hours of upstream, while the core system remains stable. If you’re looking for something more modern, Solus has been gaining popularity and also has relatively up to date packages. Debian is great for servers.

kelchm 6y ago
Manjaro is a really great option too, if you want something Arch flavored that’s a bit more user friendly.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Yeah I've used it for a while with no issues. on my "living on the edge" machine. I still stick with ubuntu for my daily drivers. I don't understand the rant though. I understand why they moved chromium to snap.
- SweetestRug 6y ago
  Definitely this. Manjaro is out-of-the-box ready, but based on Arch. Manjaro stable is also two more testing steps away from Arch, so the packages are less likely to cause issues. And there are four sources for software: Manjaro repos, the AUR, flatpacks, and snaps. I have never been in a situation where I could not install the latest software via one of those routes. I ran Debian for years and often ran into situations where new software was just not installable due to library incompatibility, etc. Manjaro feels like a Swiss Army knife in comparison.
  - narwally 6y ago
    And with all the options you'll almost never have to rely on snaps.
- 6y ago

psanford 6y ago

I've started to use nix (both nixos and nix installed on ubuntu) to manage those critical packages where I want both control and the option for major updates outside the OS's release cadence.

narwally 6y ago
I tried nix on Ubuntu recently so that I could get an up-to-date, non-snap emacs (if you already think emacs is slow to load, you should see it as a snap), and the resulting build was giving me all kinds of issues, even with just the vanilla config. I tried one other package and had issues there as well. I ended up just compiling both from source and they worked perfectly. Is there anything special about getting nix working well with other package managers? I'll be honest, the main thing keeping me from digging into it further are the docs and the syntax. I can never tell if I'm reading about nix-the-package-manager, nix-the-language, or nix-the-operating-system; and looking at the syntax makes me understand what most programmers feel when they look at lisp.
- psanford 6y ago
  Yeah the syntax is intimidating. Its definitely one of those things where its easier to start off by copying examples and then slowly learn all the details. After using it for a while it mostly starts to feel like a slightly different JSON syntax (there are a few exceptions to this but you don't end up needing that for most of what you do). Sorry to hear you had issues on ubuntu. Its hard to say how you might improve your experience without knowing more details. The nix forum is probably a good place to get support for that sort of thing.
  - narwally 6y ago
    I'm sure I could track down the issue, I just didn't have the time. I was just hoping to use it to install a more up-to-date package here and there just to dip my toes in the water and go from there. I really like the idea behind it, and hope it or something similar catches on. I may just have to throw myself into the deep end and try NixOS out in a vm.

stefan_ 6y ago

I think the last time the startup issue came up on HN we concluded it was because they are mounting a squashfs filesystem image that was created with the compression turned up to 11, and not using the kind of compression algorithm that is only slow on compression. That and the general terribleness of squashfs. Now keep in mind we can't blame squashfs here. It was developed for use on <16 MiB large NOR flash chips for embedded devices likely connected over SPI - the underlying flash and interface is so unbelievably slow that no amount of compression or terrible kernel code would ever start showing up in some kind of benchmark. Using it on super fast desktop machines with storage that rivals RAM bandwidth and latency is just the opposite of what it was developed for.

mehrdadn 6y ago
Is there any replacement for squashfs? I don't know of any other format on Linux that captures the state of the file system as fully as squashfs.
- gdm85 6y ago
  See https://ewh.ieee.org/r4/se_michigan/cs/20131019/A%20Comparative%20Analaysis%20Between%20Embedded%20Linux%20File%20Systems_old_format.pdf https://ewh.ieee.org/r4/se_michigan/cs/20131019/A%20Comparat...
- labawi 6y ago
  Squashfs is not a problem. Squashfs can be faster than ext4, sometimes many times faster (lots of small files). Selected squashfs parameters are the speed issue.
SahAssar 6y ago
From my experience squashfs can give quite okay perf if you use the right params and compression. I'd expect one of the largest linux distos to tune those params correctly.
- justsid 6y ago
  Is “quite okay perf” really the goal post though? Using applications is what makes a computer useful. It’s bad enough that applications these days are terribly slow and inefficient to begin with, I don’t want even more unnecessary slow downs on top of that.

giancarlostoro 6y ago

I know Snap isolates dependencies... But does it share them if they are common at all? I think this would make the sweet spot...

podgaj 6y ago

Debian Stable is the last great linux distro. I keep trying to go back to Fedora or Ubuntu but they are so damn buggy. And as someone living with OCD (the real thing) the whole Snap thing just makes me so anxious. And like you experienced, it is soooo slow. I cannot even go back to windows because for some reason the wifi on my laptop does not work well with it. I do not care about bleeding edge anymore, but I am a casual user mostly doing genetic research, so Debian Buster with Cinnamon is, to me, the best distro on Linux today.

wyclif 6y ago
Debian Sid is also a great option for people who used to be into the bleeding edge Linux distro scene but can settle for Debian's more conservative version of it.
- clankyclanker 6y ago
  In my dotage, I’ve come to appreciate the Debian Stable cadence: I can just set it and forget it for a year at a time. The mostly-annual upgrades have saved me so much time; everything just works in concert for long stretches of stability.
- dabockster 6y ago
  I've been loving Pop OS! lately. It feels like a "what if" version of Ubuntu had they not spent years pushing Unity, Snap, and their other side projects and just focused on the distro. Super responsive and easy to use, regardless of if you're using free or proprietary software.

gdm85 6y ago

> I blew up my Ubuntu install and switched back to Debian. I haven't missed Ubuntu at all. What are the biggest drawbacks? I know you said you don't miss Ubuntu at all, but is there anything which is causing you pain because it works differently or is just missing?

Thorentis 6y ago

Honestly, try out Linux Mint. I'm on 19.3 and it's the best OS I've ever used. Convinience of Ubuntu repos and ease of use, no Snap, some fantastic QoL widgets and apps developed for it, a great DE (well, you can choose multiple DEs but I love Cinnamon). If you want a Debian package base you can even get LMDE (Linux Mint Debian addition) which has all the perks of LM, but based on Debian instead.

dabockster 6y ago
I want to like Linux Mint but their Cinnamon DE still breaks stuff occasionally that expects either pure GNOME or Unity. Probably the devs' faults for hardcoding it to those two DEs, but still.

hkt 6y ago

I switched from Debian to Manjaro after seventeen years this summer. The Arch-isms are odd at first but it is an enormous pleasure to have a system that is up to date, stable, and works with me instead of against me. That and brew for Linux (which is very rarely needed on Manjaro) has vastly improved my user experience. Doesn't address all of what you said, but hope this is useful.

incompatible 6y ago

I also abandoned Ubuntu, and after various adventures in distro land I now use Debian Testing with Xfce.

weka 6y ago
I am currently using Ubuntu 20.04 with the Sabrent Rocket M.2 SSD and AMD Ryzen 3900x and several times my OS continiously locks up some programs for a short time (Chrome, Firefox, etc.) or becomes really slow. This computer I built is relatively new and used for work mostly so I am not sure if it's Ubuntu or I downloaded a stray snap package but man I have noticed Snap packages can be ... slow. I used Debian and it seems to be gaining detractors from Ubuntu, my only question is... what made you switch and sick with Debian?
- incompatible 6y ago
  I suppose I'm used to apt-based systems, although I don't know if it really makes any difference. So many other distros are based on Debian, but often it seems like a pretty thin layer, perhaps poorly maintained, over Debian itself. Debian seems to have so many more developers, so why not just use it directly. The rough edges I've found: no automatic updater or security updates in testing, just run apt update/upgrade once a day. An initial problem with the video driver not working because it requires non-free firmware, solution is just to add Debian non-free (it would have been helpful if a warning was given during installation). Firefox/thunderbird still on an old long-term-service release: I've been installing tarballs manually for now.

cjauvin 6y ago

Ah I'm glad to finally understand why Emacs 27 starts so slowly: I installed it as a snap (while my Emacs 26 was from a PPA), and I spent a great deal of time trying to find what was the culprit in my init.el config, to no avail.