I’m not trying to win any wars here, I’m just providing some context for this discussion. I also think there are glaring issues with snaps, but I think it’s important to explain the context so both parties can understand each other. Without understanding, these discussions turn into unproductive “yes!”, “no!” shouting matches.
I don’t think anyone has to be convinced that the startup speed is still an issue for some desktop snaps. Many people are working on fixing this, both from Canonical and people in the community. The latest work on startup speed is discussed here: Application startup performance
Part of the difficulty with snap startup speed is that the issues fall into two categories: issues with individual snaps and issues with snapd itself.
- For example, reducing the size of your snap greatly improves startup speed. Simply updating your snap to use the desktop extensions will also improve the startup speed of your snap. Updating all these snaps is a long process, especially since snaps are published by thousands of different developers. Flathub has an advantage here in that they have much more oversight in who publishes Flatpaks and what build manifests these people are using, given that every app manifest is part of one GitHub org.
- On the snapd side, many performance issues have already been fixed. The remaining issues now are the compression and library caching and are currently being worked on. However, these only affect a small number of snaps. Most snaps are able to have good startup performance if they are updated to use the latest tools.