If I had a visual way of installing snaps with the Ubuntu app store, I would use it no prob but adding 3rd party repos isn't a viable option for me when I could make do with the default vetted repos. I had to change my CI/CD config where I ran accessibility tests with Chrome's web driver into another distro because Ubuntu broke their previously functioning functions. Building from source would be possible but it's slow and costly to run for every commit.
It is clearly a NO GO Canonical, you can't ship slower apps (that start in 3-5 seconds), that out of snap (or in Windows), start in less than a seconds.
snapped Chromium takes 3-5 seconds in its first start in a 16GB ram, corei 5, ssd based machine. WHAT?
In the same hardware the .deb Chromium takes maybe half a second to load and be fully responsive.
The occurs with LOTS of software, and yeah, the start time of an app IS a thing.
If something takes more than half a second to start, and you know it is A LOT faster, you end up pissed off,
What have they done with MY hardware and why?
If Canonical start to annoy me with many more packages forced to snap like chromium, I'll be jumping to whatever distro lets me start MY apps in less than a second, as it is usual in 2020.
And if this unfinished, unpollished crap starts to show off in Ubuntu server in its current sorry state, I cannot express how fast I will be ditching LTS for Debian or anything "not snapped".
You NEED to make this thing to start A LOT FASTER,
and stop making "end user assumptions" about what you could mess up behind scenes in the system (yeah, you could end stomping actually useful things like sleeping in notebooks).
There are multiple gui frontends for apt. Are we disingenuously pretending this isn't so?
> Compile from scratch
On a lot of laptops this would be 24 hours of straight building which would have to be redone when underlying libraries changed. This would further be non obvious until after an update your browser didn't open. Furthermore the setup for building it would be apt pun intended to be at least slightly complicated and errors caused by lack of say the needed dev packages would be non obvious and confusing to regular users. Pretending this is a reasonable alternative is of dubious value.
The browser is the single most important application on most users computer. Syncing it by itself and the users profile, settings, bookmarks, and passwords restores much of what the user expects from their computer. Providing no obvious way to install it without learning about ppas and wading through tons of out of date ppas to figure out the correct one that works with your system is non obvious, non discoverable and frustrating. Virtually all new users will end up with the snap version and thinking linux is just slow.
>guess how Chrome is packaged and installed there
Methodologies for packaging have different attributes and downsides Snap != Mac OS
I never said to recompile everything, just specific things. You don’t need to rebuild your kernel, libc, compiler, and so on to compile Chromium.
Snap is not the same as macOS apps. But macOS apps are self-contained statically linked apps most of which don’t hook into centralized updating services. Yet macOS is more usable than Ubuntu (I say this as someone who desperately wishes the reverse was true). macOS apps have more in common with snap apps than with dynamically linked .deb packages.
Conversely I have used a variety of app store interfaces on various linux distros that were quite usable and pleasant with search functions that actually worked.
Here for example is a relatively recent video showing installing software via the Linux Mint Software GUI
The only real complaint I see here is that automatic updates don’t allow you to control them. That is a real shame but also isn’t inherent in the design of snaps so could be fixed.
Part of the problem is that making .deb packages is an arcane art. I wish it wasn’t. And dependency hell of “well this version of the distro comes with libxxx 1.1 and the other one has 1.0.7 and now I need to build multiple versions of the package just to make it work for 20.04 and 18.04” does suck.
I do love Debian as a platform and I don’t use snap, but I also use macOS as my desktop OS and guess how Chrome is packaged and installed there?