 When it comes to the whole snaps versus flat pack thing I've had many things to say over the course of the last few years I've talked about how flat packs have basically won how the vast majority of distros outside of a boon tour choosing flat packs I've talked about why that is and when it comes to snaps specifically I've talked about how horrible they are how slow they are because They're slow and I've talked about because there's parts of the back end that are Proprietary how that's horrible and oh my god. You should never use snaps I've I've perpetuated a lot of fun when it comes to snaps and I don't think that that's really all that unwarranted because well there are parts of the back end that are proprietary and They have a history of being astonishingly slow So even as much as a year ago, or maybe it was like a year and a half ago or so now When you launch the Firefox snap it took like 50 seconds to actually load on a cold boot And that's not a great experience when you want something to launch like glickety-split, right? So snaps have a tenant have a bad reputation especially when it comes to my experience with them, so I Wanted to see if that was all still true I decided that I was going to wipe flat packs from my system Which I'd basically done anyways because I've been using mostly distro box for the last six months or so But I wiped all of the flat packs out least that I could and Switched everything that I was still using natively to snaps And I've been using snaps now for a little bit over a week and I have some thoughts on them So the question that I want to answer today is are snaps better than they used to be? Because that's the question that I had going into this are are they better because they certainly couldn't be any worse, right? They were really really bad back in the day, which is like not even that long ago They were really effing slow and that was a bad experience So are they better and that's what we're going to answer today before we do if you leave a thumbs up on this video I'd really appreciate it. It would really help the channel. So snaps Let's talk about them. So first off. Let's talk about Let's go ahead and actually answer the question. Are they better? Yes They are in fact better than they used to be now I have a very gigantic asterisks to put by that because they're not always better. They're Mostly always better that mostly sometimes better than they used to be it really does depend So here's the thing the guys at canonical the dev team behind Ubuntu and behind snaps have apparently done a really good job of providing the technology needed for snaps Packaged by snapcraft to be fast on launch. They've done the work So if you go download the snap of firefox, it's going to load Fairly quickly. It's not going to be instantaneous. It's still going to take a couple seconds But the flat pack of firefox takes a couple seconds to launch In my experience in certain situations like the snap of flat of firefox like the snap of discord like the snap of audacity they launch really really fast or at least as fast as firefox now I have done some scientific testing and when I use scientific I really mean scientific testing On this phenomenon. So I have some b-roll that I'm going to show you of The snaps of certain applications launching and the flat packs of certain applications launching Which way that goes will be in a little title along the bottom So you'll be able to see which is a snap which is a flat pack. I'll be Showing that over this spiel here. But basically what I've experienced is that in certain situations Yes, there are some applications that are packaged via snap that are at least just as fast as the native application And specifically in my testing as the flat pack version of those applications So to answer the question Sometimes is the answer to the question, but it's not always and that's where we start getting into some of the negative things But let's talk about the speed before we get into anything else So earlier when I mentioned that the developers at canonicals have given the packages of snap the tools To make their snaps faster That doesn't mean that every package of snaps has taken advantage of that technology And that's where our problem is is that some applications Seem to be just as slow as they ever were so one example I have of this is the to-do list application to do this is packages a snap. It's also packaged as a flat pack I switched from the flat pack version to snaps just like I did everything else And on cold boot every time it takes at least 40 to 50 seconds to actually load That's a ridiculous load time for a to-do list application It's not loading a whole bunch of libraries like gimp or or Blender or whatever. It's just a to-do application. All it is is an electron app. It's all it is right So it shouldn't take that long to load But what's happening there as far as I can tell is that the person who Packaged to do as a snap didn't take advantage of the newer technologies that allow it to launch faster Another example of this actually is OBS. I know I listed it earlier, but that was a mistake OBS for whatever reason takes quite a long time to load as a snap Now the reason why is because snap is not an official Application packaged by the OBS guys and it's done just by some person on you know snap craft and Apparently they haven't done the work to make it efficiently open on cold boot. It still takes quite a bit of time so My experience with snap in terms of speed over the course of the last week has been very hit or miss Some applications open up really really fast and I'm like wow. This is a good experience Some applications launch really really slow like to do this which I open up every single day And I'm like wow. This is a horrible experience Please please open before I turn old and gray It's a hit and miss experience and the one thing you can say about flat packs is that they're fairly consistent when it comes to Open times you there's a lot of flaws that flat packs have you know not allowing consistent theming across the board They're slower than they used to be They have you know some weird thing where you manage all of your permissions outside of the application. It's a little weird, right? So there are a lot of criticisms. I have a flat packs. I've made a whole video about that But when it comes to launch times on flat packs for the most part, it's very consistent, right? It's it does its thing and every application starts up pretty much On a reasonable amount of time, right? It takes a little you know a few seconds and it launches That's across the board on snaps. It's not so much the case Sometimes it launches really really fast and you're impressed like so for example, here's here's a thing I've downloaded the audacity snap and actually the audacity snap launches faster Then the flat pack version of audacity don't know why but it does so it can it is 100 possible for snaps to be At least as fast as flat flat pack or faster than flat pack when it comes to launch time on boot Or on a cold boot, right? So that hit or miss experience was kind of it made my experience not so even keel That made me feel like oh, what am I going to expect from this next thing? Is it going to launch really fast? Is it going to launch really slow? I won't know until I try and then once I know I'm either really happy with it or I'm not It's very a very uneven experience. So that's speed You guys got to remember that the number one complaint we've always had about snaps is that they are slow They seem to have fixed that problem It's just going to be a matter of the people who package snaps taking advantage of those fixes Which is still not something that all of them have done My thought is that they should actually force the issue here And if you want to have your package on the snap store You should take advantage of the new technology or whatever it is. However, they want to word it, right? So the everything on the snap store Takes advantage of whatever it is they've done and they all can open up at the same speed That that'd be the way that they should do it. But uh, it doesn't seem like they're they're going to do it that way So the speed item is still hit or miss now. Let's talk next about Availability, so we talked about how flat packs have one right that Basically everyone who's packaging anything is packaging it on or as a flat pack And that's still basically the case if you want something and you want to be sure for sure It's going to be there. You're probably going to want to go look for it as a flat pack It's probably going to be as a flat pack somewhere along the line You can either download it from a, you know, third party store so you can get it from flat hub That's usually the case with basically everything When it comes to snaps The catalog isn't as wide as flat packs is it's just not Even though they're all in one place Which is more than you can say for flat hub or in flat pack and all that stuff You can find some holes in their catalogs. So things like vorda Vorda is a board backup system. It's not there. Same thing with pica. It's also a board backup I thought one of the two would be there neither one of them are at least that I could find right And there were several little instances of that where I was trying to find You know snap alternatives to the flat packs that I had installed that weren't just there And that also is not a very good experience, especially when you consider the snaps And the snap store is the primary source of software for Big distros like Ubuntu Right, that's where they get the vast majority of their software They've even gone so far as to remove devs from their snap store You know gooey interface and just serve you snaps and when you have some gaping holes in there When I say gaping holes, I mean is that there's some software applications that I use that weren't there Probably the big stuff the big name stuff like obs and Audacity and firefox all that stuff is going to be there So if all you do is get the main lines of stuff, you're probably not going to see the holes that I did But when I compare flat hub specifically and snaps the snap store Flat hub definitely wins when it comes to the wider selection at least from what I see now Is are there probably examples out there where snaps have something that flat hub does probably they're just probably Examples of that out there But when I when I compare to the stuff that I used I found almost everything on flab And some of the stuff I couldn't find at snaps So the last thing that I want to talk about when it comes to my Experiment here with snaps over the course of the last week are things that annoyed me And there are two of them and these are two annoyances that have been there since the very beginning And they're still annoyances now and they're they're the two reasons why I probably won't continue to use snaps outside of the Intermittent slowness that still exists and still plague some applications, which is still probably the bigger more Impactful reason why I won't use snaps going forward. So like I said, there are two Things that annoy me The first one is that loopback devices are still a thing when it comes to snaps Now I understand that there's when you do ls blk You can add some flags so that hides loop the loopback devices So let me actually show you what the loopback devices actually are So these right here are the loopback devices and they show up for every for every snap that you install every single one of them And that's not great, but it annoys me because I do use ls blk quite often when i'm doing things And I don't want that cruft to be there now you can Alias this to something else to hide those then they're you know kind of out of sight out of mind They're still there, but you don't see them So I can work around this particular annoyance, but it's still annoying that is there plus I don't know why this bothers me But when I do when I'm looking at this what I'm doing is I'm looking at block devices Basically, I'm looking at partitions of my hard drives When I see something else there it makes me feel like they're messing around with the partitions on my hard drives Now that's not what they're doing. I understand that But it makes me feel like that's what they're doing and nobody gets to mess with my partitions other than me Okay, nobody gets to do that if if you're an application and you're messing around with my partitions without my permission I'm going to be furious with you and I'm not going to use you right now Like I said, I understand that they're not actually messing around with partitions or sub volumes or any of that stuff on my computer But when I see this when I run lsblk where all the rest of my Partitions and stuff are listed out I'm going to think that that's what they're doing even though I know that they're not it still makes me correlate those two things in my mind hole And I don't like that. It bugs me He like don't do this. Why why is that a thing now? I understand that there's probably some technological reason why they do it this way fine, whatever but still the Optics of it just bugged the shit out of me and that just Is one of the big reasons why I've always really so seriously just like snaps But let me show you the the other reason why so if I do an ls here in my home directory Now you're going to see a whole bunch of stuff here But there's one folder here that won't go away And that's the snap folder. It's right there. You can't hide it Now you if you use a graphical file manager You which I do I use crusader you can issue a command that looks like this Thank you, josh for showing me this you can run this command here that will hide The snap directory when you are in a gooey file manager That's great. But if you run ls or if you run ranger like so you're going to still see That snap is still there. So it doesn't actually hide it From your terminal use which is just annoying And Bugs the crap out of me because again My home directory is mine. Okay. I don't like it's now Obviously, I I have some issues here, but if you look at my home directory It's cluttered af if you will I've given up on the idea of all the hidden files being in the dot configuration and dot data xdg data where they're supposed to be I'm giving up on that whole Dream where developers decide to put their Directories where they're supposed to go instead of just shoving them in the home directory But at least when you're talking about mozilla Or your fonts folder or your bash rc or your the dot cargo Directory all that stuff is at least hidden by a period right when it comes to the snaps directory That's there and probably it's goes along with your documents your downloads and your music and your pictures. It's right there in Your non hidden directories and that like no at least At least when I do When I go into ranger and I just don't have the hidden files on I should be able to just see The directories that are even or they're either default Or are things that I've created right seeing things like games or my repo Those are things that I've created that I want to see but snap Decides that they're going to put this directory in the home directory and have it visible for you to see always and No Don't do that. That's you mean stupid That that's my home directory not yours. You don't get to do with what you please Especially when it's not hidden if they just literally all they had to do Was add a period to this and I wouldn't be able to complain because as I see as you see The rest of my home directory is full of hidden files that I can't for the most part get rid of or I'm too lazy to get rid of you know, whatever just put them there Uh, they can stay hidden with the rest of the things that I hardly ever see when I'm using ranger or whatever But no that period was too much work for them or or they had some technical difficulty when it comes to hiding the damn directory I don't know what the reason their reason is all I know is that there's been a bug report on that For literal years and I'm talking about not just like one or two years. I'm talking like five or six years Basically since snaps have become a thing In the mainstream that bug report has existed maybe even longer and it's still there I understand they've had other things to deal with like making snaps faster But this doesn't seem like something that would take it seems like one guy could go in and fix this in a day It feels like that's what they could do sim link it or something. I don't There has to be some kind of solution here Which will get their grubby mitts off from my home directory. So loop bag devices and The snap directory into home directory both those thing things really really bother me and are Among the prior primary reasons why I won't continue to use snaps the intermittent slowness really is the most impactful ones These ones here just bug me. They don't impact the performance of snaps The intermittent slowness does bother bother me because I don't want my to-do list application to take You know 60 seconds to load. That's just ridiculous. So I have used snaps for a week And like I said, I'm not going to continue these I'm going to delete snapd from my system And I'm going to go back to using flat packs where when I need to Mostly I'll be defaulting to distro box because it's far superior for my use case. I understand when I made my whole Distro box is better than flat packs video that pissed a lot of people off because like oh, that's not the solution, right? The solution is flat packs because it's cross platforms and it means the developers can you know package once and it's everywhere From a developer standpoint, you guys are right flat packs and even snaps to a lesser extent Are the way to go Because you can package for those formats and then everyone can download them. That's great as a developer I'm happy for you to have that option available to you. But as a user for me Still distro box is A lot of the time is the best way to go now I still do use a few flat packs just because it's better to have them as native applications And it's just you know more useful that way You know like actual on the host system instead of being Running a container things like vorra. I still prefer to have run locally. So there are still a few selections where I use flat packs so That's really where my situation is when it comes to packaging stuff on my system You know and actually more recently I've been even just downloading stuff from the open suzer repositories Because guys the open suzer repository is really really good. You add an opi in the obs. Oh You're basically using art the arch repose and at that point. Oh, yeah, there's some big make You know gaping holes there, but it's still really really good. So open suzer For the wind And one of these days I'll remember not to move my phone when I want to show off my sticker Anyway, so that's it for this video You guys can leave a thumbs up on this video if you really liked it really really helped the channel If you haven't hit the subscribe button yet hit that subscribe button trying to get to 60,000 by the end of the year. I don't know why I have a goal It's really silly to have a goal for subscribers because you can't control that nonsense But whatever I do silly things all the time anyways subscribe button if you haven't already You can follow me on mastodon or odyssey those links will be in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash lindy's cast You can also head on over to the merch shop where you'll find t-shirts and hoodies and hats and Beanie's and there's a desk mat over there, which is just fantastic piece of kit And you should definitely check that out. 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