The Future of Flatpak

I'd largely agree. Snap was what drove me away from Ubuntu, after the calculator app started taking ages to load. The calculator! It was instant before snapification.

I have played with using FlatPak, and while it seems snappier than snap, I always ended up with something not quite working, because of permissions or sandboxing. The answer to a lot of problems seemed to be "don't use the FlatPak version".

The set of software I use complex enough to need something like FlatPak while also not needing to interact with other things is basically very, very small.

When was this?

Snap _was_ a bit slow in the early days. It's not any more.

I use Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04 and 25.04. Snap is pretty fast these days.

I have gone around purging all my custom repos and PPAs, removing those apps, and reinstalling the snap versions. It's just easier and it works.

I am running 3 quite elderly Thinkpads in near-daily use: an X220, T420, and W520. All Core i7, all with RAM maxed out, all with SSDs. They are perfectly usable for what I need and they have great keyboards which no more modern Thinkpads do.

Ubuntu 22.04 on a 13-year-old Thinkpad loads snap apps in an eyeblink now. I can't detect any delay compared to natively-packaged apps.

Yes, it uses a bit more disk space.

I used to remove all snaps and then `apt purge snapd` but it's not worth the extra effort any more.

See, I really don't understand how my experiences were so different from yours. Not in terms of speed, but in terms of just working. It was always things like missing or misconfigured apparmor profiles causing errors with snap and/or flatpak, sandboxes needing to run/be owned as root error messages, failure to save documents in one of my home folders, adjusting permissions for that, still doesn't work...and on and on.

Depends what you run, I suppose.

I have natively-packaged browsers: Waterfox and Chrome.

In Snaps I run less essential but workaday stuff: Ferdium (my multi-protocol messaging client), Slack, Signal, Telegram, Skype (RIP), Spotify. I don't care if they can't access my filesystem; I don't want them to.

All are trouble-free for me.

I used to carefully remove all snaps, then do `apt purge snapd`, then block it from being reinstalled. After that I installed deb-get:

https://github.com/wimpysworld/deb-get

And then I used that to get, install, and update all the apps I needed that weren't in the Ubuntu repos.

It worked very well, but Ubuntu version upgrades were hazardous: the best result will be that the `do-release-upgrade` tool disables them all, the upgrade works fine, then you have to go through and manually re-enable them all, where necessary, editing the apt `.list` files to point to the new version of each app's repo.

It was a PITA, and that's why now, I recommend just leaving snap there.

Oh, it was a long time ago, probably 18.04 or something when they first introduced snaps.

Glad to hear they fixed the speed issues; I just moved to PopOS.