Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22972661

Many competent companies MITM employee traffic to scan for malware, leaking confidential data, etc.

I tried Pop!_OS 20.04 in a VM just yesterday and my experience was dreadful especially with its "store" application. Things like the entire program freezing randomly for seconds while trying to fetch things, images taking ages to show up (btw, i have high speed connection), showing me ridiculous download sizes for flatpak packages (think something like Geany requiring 1.1GB or something like that), not giving any indication about download processes if you navigate away, wasting screen space when showing applications in a category (it uses a list view where each entry gets a huge icon at the left side, its title, some very short and useless description next to the icon like "Goofy is a goof foogbar", an "Install" button at the right side and vast swaths of emptiness in between), etc.

Also had UI screwups everywhere, like the Preferences application cutting out the "Preferences" title in the titlebar to "Preferenc..." when a) those three dots took the same space as the rest of the word and b) that title was the only thing in the entire titlebar with almost 500px of unused space at each side. Or controls moving and windows resizing a few pixels after i start typing something (e.g. trying to type some number in the calculator has the divider between the buttons and the number move down a little the first time i type something). And the entire "let's merge titlebar and toolbar" idea is as awful as it was when GNOME 3 introduced it (well, actually it was iTunes but i do not remember anyone ever saying that they liked iTunes). Trying some of the preinstalled apps, i accidentally clicked some tool buttons trying to move a window around (the UI being slow didn't help).

And it was dog slow. Terribly, irredeemably, laughably slow. Opening the icons had the entire UI chug worse than my 386 running Windows 3.1 (and actually i'm pretty sure if i wrote a program to move icons around in Windows 3.1 it would be faster).

IMO the only time i felt Linux had a high quality desktop environment was actually the first Linux distribution i used: Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 (to the point that in my youthful enthusiasm i force installed it to every relative and friend's computers i encountered :-P). That distribution was very well put together and thought out (try to find it in archive.org and test it in 86box or PCem with an emulated Pentium 200 and 32MB of RAM to see what i'm talking about). It had some issues, but two decades later things should have been much improved - instead everything went downhill after that and for most Linux users their desktop use is mainly a matter of how much tolerance you have for all the issues you encounter (ie. when you see someone having a problem and there is a reply like "i never had that problem" or "i've been using Linux XYZ for years and that has never been my experience", it is usually from someone who had a high enough tolerance that anything non-major does not even register anymore).

Ok, maybe not desktops? But ZFS on-disk compression is a sysadmin's frickin dream -- just one example that you can access logfiles with plaintext tools like grep while benefiting from the space savings with neglible cost, LZ4 has basically no overhead at all, https://www.servethehome.com/the-case-for-using-zfs-compress...

I really hope you will try on-disk compression, encryption, deduplication, and that sort of thing sometime, you will see it is so much better than gzip-compressed, gpg-encrypted files

It's ridiculous.