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this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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From the context of this thread, I have no idea what a snap is
and I'm conflicted on whether I should inquire
Say you have a web browser, and to play videos it needs some codecs and a player, and to display pages it needs fonts, and to ... on and on.
Before Snaps, when you installed the browser it would install the programs it needed at the same time, because the developer designed it to do so.
With Snaps, the program, and everything it needs, and everything they need, and they need, on down the chain all gets zipped together.
The good is that dependency management is easy, everything is in one place. The bad is that they're slow to launch because of how everything is stored, and you now end up with many copies of the dependencies, and their dependencies, on your hard drive instead of 1.
The above is just representative, but those who prefer optimized systems do not like snaps. Those who like things tidy with easy dependencies are wrong. I mean, they like snaps.
What's the problem with static linking if all this is considered worth the pain?
Nothing in particular other than needing to update your builds when any single dependency has an important fix and still needing to build and maintain packaging for every single distro you support. For small applications shipping a static binary should be fine, but when you're talking about something like Chrome or Firefox that's a whole lot of overhead.
It's also a mechanism to sandbox applications, which static linking can't do.
Please correct me if I'm off base (I don't use snaps), but this is only true for in-memory mounted snaps, not for first-run or expired. Meaning you sacrifice RAM for speedy repeat starts.
I don't know how does Snap handles its loops (which I believe mounting is or was the slow part), but Linux always caches as much as possible in the unused memory.
Snap is a universal packaging format (like flatpak) developed by Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu).
Look up snap and flatpak, they're both based on a distro agnostic image/packaging model that allows developers to package for multiple distros rather than building native packaging for every single one. Both systems also solve the problem of two softwares requiring separate versions of the same dependency which is a fiddly problem at best for native packages.
Personally I'm a fan of flatpak, snap is similar but wholly driven by Canonical and their business interests.
Both have features that provide a solidly good reason to use them, there isn't a clear "better" system yet. I prefer Flatpak personally but snap still handles some cases (daemon software run by the system or as root) better than flatpak.