Why is snaps hated - Lemmy

I see people hate snap packaging and removing of their OS support it. Is it because it’s fully open-source or just due to how the technology works?

Here’s my answer to this same question from an old thread on Reddit:

My Ubuntu system always reserved a whopping 20% of my 32GB ram for no reason and I never bothered to know why. Later I uninstalled snapd because of boot time issues and guess what happened? Only 1.5 GB used after a fresh boot.

I had like 4 different JetBrains IDEs installed via snap with each totalling around 2GB of disk space. While removing snapd I discovered it kept back 2-3 previous versions of every package on your disk.

Uninstalling this bloat was the best thing I did to my ubuntu system. It was suddenly light as a feather and way more responsive like I just did a fresh system install.

Some time later I was installing something from apt and Ubuntu tried to install it from snap, thus sneakily installing snapd in the process. Looking for a solution, I felt like I was looking up how to disable Windows updates or some other shit.

I had a moment of clarity and wondered why the fuck did I have to put up with this kinda bullshit on Linux. I wiped that drive clean and switched to Fedora.

One of my biggest gripes about Windows was updates, virus scans and compatibility scans running autonomously while I am trying to get stuff done, sucking up network, drive access and CPU. I didn’t need Ubuntu doing the same thing to me - I want to kick off updates manually when I am taking a break for lunch or at the end of the day before shutdown.
As a power use this drives me nuts, but I know plenty of end users who are better off with those things turned on.