 One of the unfortunate things about the Linux community is there are a lot of people in our community that love to hate on certain projects. And sometimes they like to throw unnecessary hate at certain projects. For example, snap packages. Snap packages. There's a lot of things to be critical about snap packages because I have some complaints about snap packages. You know, I could list some of the reasons that or some of the areas I think canonical could improve with snap packages. But I don't go out of my way to nitpick and find things that are not really issues with snap packages and then try to make a big deal about it. For example, one of the biggest complaints I see on the internet about snap packages is the fact that it pollutes your list block command, the LSBLK command at the command line, which lists all your drives, all your partitions on your system. And snap packages are actual mounted file systems on your computer. So when you do a LSBLK, every snap package installed on your system is part of the output now of LSBLK. And a lot of people just lose their minds about that because I guess they find that just distracting that, you know, if I do a LSBLK, you know, these first 19 lines here, these loopback devices, those are all snap packages that are installed on my system. Let me zoom in a little bit so you guys can see that. The reason I think this is a weird criticism is for one thing, how often do you run the LSBLK command, especially after you've already installed your system and got all your partitions set up. And you're typically not going to have snaps installed when you're doing all of that initially when you're doing a base arch install. So you're never going to see this stuff. I guess some people have a need to run the LSBLK command all the time. I don't know why, but if you did and it bothered you that these loopback devices were here, LSBLK has a flag. If I do LSBLK-E for exclude, give it a number and the number needs to be this major number. You see the loopback devices are all seven. So just exclude seven and run the LSBLK with that flag and that number. And now it just has my actual devices, right? These are all of my SSD drives and partitions here, right? Without any of the mounted snaps. So for you guys, one of your biggest complaints about snap packages is the LSBLK command. Just use the exclude flag and you know what, set up an alias for it, right, if it bothers you. I don't want to have to type dash e space seven because that's four extra characters I have to type now thanks to them dang snap packages, right? Just make a bash alias for it. Another criticism that people often talk about is the speed of snaps, which I understand snaps. Some snaps are slow. I've experienced this, oddly enough, I only ever experienced that on Ubuntu because Ubuntu has snap packages already installed out of the box on their recent versions. And some of those programs that they install as snap packages for whatever reason do tend to load slow. But oddly enough on Arch Linux, ArchBase Linux distributions where I've installed snaps such as Arco Linux here in front of me and Manjaro and Endeavor, other Arch based systems. I never really experienced those slow snap packages. For example, one of the most common programs that I tell people to install is snap packages is a game called ZeroAD and ZeroAD I've installed it as a snap many times on various systems and it just launches. It launches like a native package, like it just comes up, right? There's no, you know, waiting for 30 seconds, you know, some crazy amount of time. If I do a snap list on my system, let's see what snaps are installed. I don't have very much installed, but here is a good graphical program. The snap store, which is basically just the GNOME software center, although it connects to snap craft and lists all the snap packages, right? So if I do snap dash store, let's launch that and wait a second. I mean, it launched almost immediately, right? We had that loading screen up front, but that was it syncing, I guess, the repos for snap craft so we can actually tell us what software is available. But that application, that application window came up almost immediately, right? I mean, as soon as I hit enter, let's do that, right? It's up, right? So I understand that's not for every snap package, right? There are some that are slow, but again, I think a lot of people complain about the speed and many of them probably have never even used snap packages. I see this, there's way too many people that complain about snaps and I get the feeling that a lot of these people don't really know what they're talking about. They haven't actually used this stuff. Now I will say some of my complaints with snap packages because I do have some complaints. I do think, again, Ubuntu, for whatever reason, does snaps worse than their distributions? Like some of the recent versions of Ubuntu I've taken a look at on the channel, you know, some of their applications launch very slowly. I don't know what they're doing with their snaps that other distributions aren't doing, but Ubuntu snaps do tend to be a little slower. I don't know why. The other thing that has really put people off with Ubuntu in particular is the fact that they're installing snaps by default, which I don't have a problem with that. I mean, I don't care if people install snaps or flat packs or app images already on their distro. It's their distribution. They can do that. One of the complaints that a lot of people have with Ubuntu and I have too is when you do a sudo apt install, you know, the chromium, you know, the chromium browser, and that was actually installing a snap package rather than a Debian package. I had a problem with that because it's almost like you're tricking people where they think they're they think they're installing a native package. But what they're getting is a snap package. I didn't like that personally, but really the only real complaint, the legitimate complaint that people should have with snap packages is the fact that the snap store, the snap servers are proprietary closed source, right? Canonical controls those things. They're the only ones that have control of that thing. And that really prevents it from ever gaining widespread adoption, right? When we talk about snaps, flat packs, app images, flat packs and app images are going to have much wider distribution among various Linux distributions, because most Linux distributions are not going to want to install snaps when they have no control over the server, right? All of that is locked down. Canonical owns it. It's closed source proprietary. And I think that's that's a big deal. And that's something that Canonical should fix. They should open source the whole thing. And I've said that many times over the years. But again, just because I have that complaint with snap packages and honestly, they're not my favorite packaging format, I would prefer to use app images if I can find an app image or maybe even flat pack compared to snap. But again, I'm not one of these people, you know, I hate it for this one particular reason, the fact that it's closed source. So now I've got to make up stuff, make up reasons to hate it. Oh, it's slow. Oh, the LSBL command has too much stuff in it. I can't read that extra 30 lines of loopback devices in the LSBL command. I'm going to lose my mind. No, I don't need to do that. And you guys don't need to do that, too. There's too much of this unnecessary hate thrown at snaps, system D, Ubuntu, you know, various things out there that people love to just trash and then everybody just pause on. And I don't want you guys to do that. So when you see somebody, especially complain about that LSBLK problem, give them the dash E flag or just tell them to read the man page. And before I go, I need to thank a few special people, Devon Gabe James Matt, Michael Mitchell, Paul Scott, Wes Allen, Armoredrack, and Chuck Commander, Angrie Diochai, Dylan George, Lee, Lennox, Ninja Maxim, Mike Erion, Alexander, Peter Arsham, Fodor, Polytech, Red Prophet, Steven, Willie, these guys. They're my high steered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this episode would not have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. It's just me and you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and open source technology, please subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right guys, peace. You can even install Emacs as a snap.