i run debian 13 on my laptop. it runs on a 5200rpm hard disk, so some bootup slowdown is to be expected, but it got really bad for some reason. booting up could take up to 3 minutes just to get to the display manager
after running systemd-analyze blame i found the two main culprits: docker and snapd. i had snapd and flatpak installed so that i could have access to as many applications as i could, but it seems that snaps have a huge amount of overhead. i knew about the one million mountpoints caused by snaps, but the amount of services they have to start on boot surprised me. snapd alone took 30 seconds to start and then there were its dependencies
my boot time is now down to 1min 50s. i recommend anyone who still has snapd installed on a non-ubuntu distro to uninstall it
Why?
Because their sandboxing format subtly breaks so many applications (more than flatpak) and Canonical very nefariously co-opts your
apt install <package>with a deb package that’s actually a stub to install the Snap version, so when your shit breaks, you can waste hours before you realize that they fucked your installation.Beyond that, Snap cold start times (installations or updates) are slow as shit (yes, even with LZO compression), and since each snap application can update on its own, you’ll also encounter random times when your shit appears to “freeze” but what’s actually happening is Canonical is busy polluting your loopback devices to decompress their shittified version of your app.