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Ubuntu Talks Up Faster KDE Snaps, But Still Takes A While For Cold Apps To Launch

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  • Ubuntu Talks Up Faster KDE Snaps, But Still Takes A While For Cold Apps To Launch

    Phoronix: Ubuntu Talks Up Faster KDE Snaps, But Still Takes A While For Cold Apps To Launch

    Back in late 2020 it was originally talked about for Canonical's effort around Snap packages to switch to LZO compression for faster start-up times. Today they published a new blog post on the Ubuntu site highlighting the Snap speed-ups while looking at KDE packages. The LZO-compressed packages are faster than XZ indeed, but still rather a lengthy start-up time for cold apps...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    Developers have started adopting the new LZO algorithm in their workflows, with positive results and feedback from the users.
    Snaps have finally caught up to BTRFS in 2011.

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    • #3
      When will Canonical finally accept that the technical architecture of Snap is just really bad. When your web browser takes 15 seconds to start, its bad, its an issue, its not acceptable.

      What does Snap better then its competition, or even old package technologies.

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      • #4
        I wonder if that's system-related, 'cause the Snap fan club always points out that Snaps always launch fast, even on cold starts.

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        • #5
          When I see the word "Snaps" in the headline it instantly makes my blood boil because I already now there is going to be nothing positive about it.
          Also to the people who use Snaps: How do you tolerate the god awful slow startup times even on an SSD?
          I, as a regular desktop user just can't tolerate this mediocrity.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by Vistaus View Post
            I wonder if that's system-related, 'cause the Snap fan club always points out that Snaps always launch fast, even on cold starts.
            I'd think it has more to do with all the virtual file system mounts it creates when starting something up.

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            • #7
              Originally posted by user1 View Post
              Also to the people who use Snaps: How do you tolerate the god awful slow startup times even on an SSD?
              I, as a regular desktop user just can't tolerate this mediocrity.
              To do frontend web development I need a recent version of Node.js, the version of Node.js in the Ubuntu package repository is very outdated and doesn't work with some of the npm packages that I use, so my only option is to use the Snap version of Node.js. It works well.

              To use the latest version of software you often need to use Snap since the version in the repository is old. I use the Snap version of Blender, and it doesn't start so slow, a couple of seconds.

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              • #8
                Originally posted by Alexmitter View Post
                When will Canonical finally accept that the technical architecture of Snap is just really bad. When your web browser takes 15 seconds to start, its bad, its an issue, its not acceptable.

                What does Snap better then its competition, or even old package technologies.
                Tell that to the CTO of Canonical, who flat out denies there is a problem.

                I don't know what the original goal was, when Snap development began in 2015, but they have some specific server / enterprise / iot features that Flatpaks lack. I also heard that they work fine in their current state in these non desktop workloads. But why does Canonical keep shoving them down desktop user's throat is beyond me. They already received an enormous backlash when they asked regular desktop users for feedback in preparation for 22.04 LTS. Instead of listening, they simply locked that thread and probably also deleted the comments that were critical of Snaps.

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                • #9
                  I may have a quite different perspective, but the entire distribution of any GNU/Linux is relatively small (< 96 GB OS partition with ~2 TB SSDs).
                  So if anyone wants to get work done he would never use any kind of compression (for generally used programs - mp4, mp3, jpg, pdf are for consumption).
                  Additionally, when I start any program, more than 3 s is huge for me - and even several games may be faster than that ...
                  so these original values are really extreme.

                  A second thing is that the common design decisions of flatpack and snap are just stupid for the desktop/workstation use.
                  For rediculous toys like smartphones one may see an improved security, but on real systems sandboxing is just a joke.
                  Even HW virtualization is not professionally accepted to really improve security (and used for real use cases) - and a PoC can be done really fast.
                  A consistent system using same libs is something only possible with exclusive free/open SW - so any proprietary SW may spoil it.
                  But packaging free SW using old/different libraries than the system to have old problems and let all fixed on different levels is just plain stupid.
                  So KDE is a case which does not make any sense in that respect - if proprietary apps like games are packed, this would be quite ok as they really carry ancient libs.
                  But in those cases one should not talk about security when working with proprietary binaries from many different sources.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by uid313 View Post

                    I use the Snap version of Blender, and it doesn't start so slow, a couple of seconds.
                    Idk about Node.js, but you can download the latest Blender as a tarball from their website. Btw, Mozilla also provides a distro agnostic Firefox tarball, so that's what I'm going to be using when Ubuntu switches to Snap Firefox in 22.04. Firefox Snap currently sucks really bad.
                    Last edited by user1; 17 March 2022, 08:56 AM.

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