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That being said, there’s undoubtedly demand for this sort of “universal” Linux package. It’s clear how this problem would be compounded as more snaps are installed. But the snap package of the same program weighs in at an incredible 91 MB.
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If we download youtube-dl directly from the developer’s website, the script only takes up 1.7 MB on disk. After all, there’s value in being able to determine just how much of your disk space they’re taking up.įor example, let’s take a look at how the snap package for a common tool compares to installing it directly:Īs you can see, the difference is substantial. There’s actually been some talk about adding a special flag to mounted snap packages so that common tools like mount or lsblk won’t show them, but obviously that leads to its own problems.
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Some users find this element to be especially annoying from a system maintenance standpoint, as every snap package you install will actually show up as a mounted filesystem. Snap packages also tend to be slower to run, in part because they are actually compressed filesystem images that need to be mounted before they can be executed. Mounted snap packages on a default Ubuntu 20.04 install. Although when even entry level systems are now including terabyte hard drives, this is perhaps not as much of a concern as it would have been in years past. Since many programs will naturally have the same dependencies, this means a system with many snaps installed will be needlessly wasting storage space on redundant data. For one, a snap package will always be larger than a traditional package for the same program, as all the dependencies need to be shipped with it.
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Naturally, there are downsides to distributing software like this. In theory this saves time and effort on the developer’s part, and makes sure that even users of more niche distributions can get access to the software they want. The idea is that developers could release a single snap that would work on essentially any modern Linux system, rather than having to create distribution specific packages. Put simply, they are a containerized software packages that include libraries the given program requires to run. To understand the situation, we should probably take a step back and look at what snaps actually are.
This undoubtedly makes the install simple for naive users, and easier to maintain for Canonical maintainers, but it also takes away freedom of choice and diversity of package sources. While the underlying software is still open source, the snap packager breaks with long tradition of having the distribution of the software also being open and free. If you want to distribute snaps, you have to set up an account with Canonical and host it there. The short version of Clement’s complaint is that the snap packager installs from a proprietary Canonical-specific source. It can still be installed manually, but this move is seen as a way to prevent it from being added to the system without the user’s explicit consent.
Further, he announced that Mint 20 would actively block users from installing the snap framework through the package manager. In a June 1st post on the distribution’s official blog, Mint founder Clement Lefebvre made it very clear that the Ubuntu spin-off does not approve of the new package format and wouldn’t include it on base installs. Perhaps the most vocal opponent of snap, and certainly the one that’s got the most media attention, is Linux Mint.
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But for users concerned with the ideology of free and open source software, it’s seen a dangerous step towards the types of proprietary “walled gardens” that may have drove them to Linux in the first place. For the more casual user, snap is just a way to get the software they want as quickly as possible. Developed by Canonical as a faster and easier way to get the latest versions of software installed on Ubuntu systems, the software has ended up starting a fiery debate in the larger Linux community. Who would have thought that software packaging software would cause such a hubbub? But such is the case with snap.
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