Without diving into e.g. snap vs. appimage vs flatpak (which can become somewhat of a religious discussion) - snap is one of several container-based application delivery solutions. Each has its pros and cons, but they are essentially a containerized approach to software delivery. In plain English and oversimplified, basically the apps contain their own code plus that of all their dependencies, rather than dynamically linking to copies of the libraries installed on the OS. There are pros and cons to this; I'll skip the details here.
It is inherently going to take more memory than regular Debian packages due to the containerization taking place. A straight Debian package will likely be more memory efficient. I believe there are 3rd party repos and utilities which can help re: debs of popular apps. If you're strapped for memory, you may be able to leverage those. Also, I believe some Debian/Ubuntu derivatives try to supply debs in preference to snaps. There's a lot of opinions on the subject - some well-informed, others rather knee-jerk - but I tried to stay very objective here. Hope this info helps you! Best Regards, Paul Goins On Wed, Dec 14, 2022 at 5:06 PM Keith Lofstrom <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm moving from a Redhat-family distro (Scientific Linux, > a physics-heavy CENTOS clone) to Debian-family distros. > I've played with Ubuntu 20.10 and and 22.10 on two > desktops; "snap" seems to use nontrivial amounts of RAM. > My preferred laptops are only 3GB; RAM bloat is an issue. > > I also maintain an offsite virtual server; my favorite > hosting company supports CentOS, Ubuntu, and Debian. > > Is snap actually a memory hog, or is that my misperception? > Will snap remain mostly Canonical's walled garden? > > Moving to uncluttered Debian LTS (with its vast collection > of packages) seems to be a better option in the long term - > unless Debian "snap"s as well. > > Keith > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > -- > Keith Lofstrom [email protected] >
