4 ms·

> 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 t

> 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
    I've been using Linux for over 14 years exclusively. Build several linux hosting companies. I know Linux rather well. I've built a simple font manager for gnome in the past. I know the weirdness of gnome font thingies. I've had this glyph issue for over a year. In chromium, Signal, some ebook app, and several other snaps. I've tried many things. But gave up. Snap is not 'one layer of indirection' too much. It's hundreds of them. There's chroot, some VM, a virtual gnome, containerisation, weird user and permissions. And so on. This complexity made me conclude that snap is a bad solution (to a real problem). Not the glyph issue, but the fact that I cannot fix it, is, for me, the reason to conclude it has, or will fail.
    - codethief 6y ago
      Wait, since when is Signal a Snap app?
      - kohtatsu 6y ago
        Snap is a distribution format, akin to .msi or .pkg.
        yc-kraln 6y ago
        No, incorrect. Snap is a distribution format akin to VMDK or anything else which is not intended to be "installed" to a system, but rather run in a virtual machine or sandboxed.
        SahAssar 6y ago
        If we are getting into details I think calling it a "virtual machine" is not correct either. Also since snaps have some integration with the host DE through launchers and so on they are not like VMDK's.
        efreak 6y ago
        To be even more pedantic, there's nothing stopping you from using VMDK (or other disk images like VDI, VHD, raw/dd, etc) files as a container (like tar or zip), other than some extra overhead. They can easily integrate into your desktop environment, possibly even easier since there's probably more support for mounting disk images than there is for mounting archives...
  - Zardoz84 6y ago
    This could be related to Why Chrome is using a different font size that the rest my system. Chrome is the only snap program that I have . The rest are plane Debian packages or Flatpack
  - julianlam 6y ago
    Right! I ran into this not five minutes into a new 20.04 install and could not for the life of me figure out where the hell my download was, or why I couldn't access /home/julian/Downloads Why this isn't more of a deal breaker I have no freaking idea.
- hatsunearu 6y ago
  Snap programs won't let me access /tmp/ which is really annoying ;(
- axaxs 6y ago
  Yeah, and I can find no way to either modify the fs or at least mount out. Opera, I think it is, requires codecs be installed in a specific directory. So, the snap is effectively useless.
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?

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
  I've been using Linux for over 14 years exclusively. Build several linux hosting companies. I know Linux rather well. I've built a simple font manager for gnome in the past. I know the weirdness of gnome font thingies. I've had this glyph issue for over a year. In chromium, Signal, some ebook app, and several other snaps. I've tried many things. But gave up. Snap is not 'one layer of indirection' too much. It's hundreds of them. There's chroot, some VM, a virtual gnome, containerisation, weird user and permissions. And so on. This complexity made me conclude that snap is a bad solution (to a real problem). Not the glyph issue, but the fact that I cannot fix it, is, for me, the reason to conclude it has, or will fail.
  - codethief 6y ago
    Wait, since when is Signal a Snap app?
    - kohtatsu 6y ago
      Snap is a distribution format, akin to .msi or .pkg.
      - yc-kraln 6y ago
        No, incorrect. Snap is a distribution format akin to VMDK or anything else which is not intended to be "installed" to a system, but rather run in a virtual machine or sandboxed.
        SahAssar 6y ago
        If we are getting into details I think calling it a "virtual machine" is not correct either. Also since snaps have some integration with the host DE through launchers and so on they are not like VMDK's.
        efreak 6y ago
        To be even more pedantic, there's nothing stopping you from using VMDK (or other disk images like VDI, VHD, raw/dd, etc) files as a container (like tar or zip), other than some extra overhead. They can easily integrate into your desktop environment, possibly even easier since there's probably more support for mounting disk images than there is for mounting archives...
- Zardoz84 6y ago
  This could be related to Why Chrome is using a different font size that the rest my system. Chrome is the only snap program that I have . The rest are plane Debian packages or Flatpack
- julianlam 6y ago
  Right! I ran into this not five minutes into a new 20.04 install and could not for the life of me figure out where the hell my download was, or why I couldn't access /home/julian/Downloads Why this isn't more of a deal breaker I have no freaking idea.
hatsunearu 6y ago
Snap programs won't let me access /tmp/ which is really annoying ;(
axaxs 6y ago
Yeah, and I can find no way to either modify the fs or at least mount out. Opera, I think it is, requires codecs be installed in a specific directory. So, the snap is effectively useless.

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?