Faster boot in userspace without Snaps

Lounge
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1

Ubuntu 22.04LTS Gnome Desktop

Not a problem but an enhancement. My Ubuntu 22.04LTS installation using snaps started 113 systemd services in userspace and took about 28-30 seconds to reach the desktop.

I’ve never been a fan of snaps or flatpaks, so decided to remove snap using this guide:
Remove Snap

This may not be for everyone, and if you use packages only available in snap and not in the apt repositories then you cant remove snap.
Removing snaps also removed about 6G data from my / partition
After a reboot my system reaches the desktop in 12 seconds:

Blockquote
systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 3.974s (kernel) + 12.232s (userspace) = 16.207s
graphical.target reached after 12.217s in userspace

One reason for faster boot is that 113 services were started when snap was in use, without snap

5.726s udisks2.service
2.454s dev-sdc8.device
2.374s systemd-modules-load.service
1.964s accounts-daemon.service
1.829s NetworkManager.service
1.674s power-profiles-daemon.service
1.342s cups.service
1.262s avahi-daemon.service
1.247s switcheroo-control.service
1.240s systemd-logind.service
1.238s systemd-resolved.service
 978ms gpu-manager.service
 781ms apport.service
 690ms apparmor.service
 637ms gdm.service
 630ms rsyslog.service
 556ms packagekit.service
 500ms systemd-fsck@dev-disk-by\x2duuid-d2409691\x2d87c4\x2d4cdb\x2da81e\x2d7fe>
 475ms systemd-udev-trigger.service
 460ms keyboard-setup.service
 442ms systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service
 378ms systemd-udevd.service
 365ms user@1000.service
 348ms lm-sensors.service
 315ms systemd-sysusers.service
 312ms systemd-oomd.service
 305ms polkit.service
 269ms colord.service
 241ms update-notifier-download.service
 235ms systemd-random-seed.service
 186ms upower.service
 186ms kerneloops.service
 154ms systemd-journald.service
 130ms alsa-restore.service
 129ms systemd-timesyncd.service
 128ms systemd-binfmt.service
 123ms plymouth-start.service
 119ms console-setup.service
 118ms plymouth-read-write.service
 110ms systemd-remount-fs.service
  91ms systemd-journal-flush.service
  76ms dev-disk-by\x2duuid-4b29bccc\x2d4833\x2d4353\x2dad82\x2d46b56e5f773d.swap
  72ms ufw.service
  68ms setvtrgb.service
  67ms kmod-static-nodes.service
  65ms systemd-tmpfiles-setup-dev.service
  58ms systemd-update-utmp.service
  52ms home.mount
  40ms systemd-user-sessions.service
  40ms proc-sys-fs-binfmt_misc.mount
  40ms systemd-sysctl.service
  32ms dev-hugepages.mount
  31ms dev-mqueue.mount
  31ms modprobe@configfs.service
  30ms modprobe@drm.service
  30ms sys-kernel-debug.mount
  30ms sys-kernel-tracing.mount
  29ms modprobe@fuse.service
  25ms systemd-tmpfiles-clean.service
  22ms rtkit-daemon.service
   8ms user-runtime-dir@1000.service
   6ms systemd-update-utmp-runlevel.service
   5ms modprobe@efi_pstore.service
   2ms sys-fs-fuse-connections.mount
   2ms sys-kernel-config.mount

Without snap 65 services are started as listed above. My desktop is Intel i5 2.8G AMD FX5770 graphics 8G DDR3 memory and a SATA drive (~190Mbps). A modern system with SSD drive I expect performance gains should be even better.

Has anyone else noted a faster boot without snap installed ?

1 Like
2

Welcome to Ubuntu Discourse :slight_smile:

Since your post is not a support request I moved it to the Lounge which is more for general discussions.

Thank you for including the caveat about packages which are only available as snaps, this is an important distinction.

1 Like
3

I don’t notice any perceptual difference in time booting Ubuntu or any other distro. Either with a SATA SSD or NVME SSD.

4

Yes.

But what is the intention behind the question?

It is a logical conclusion that the start-up time is reduced with everything that does not need to be loaded.

Other factors are also influence the start-up time, such as scaling drivers, scaling governors, platform energy profiles, I/O schedulers, PCIe settings, etc.

Is it just snap bashing?

5

In my case, I wanted a faster boot and as an experiment decided to disable snap.
As it turns out with my combination of hardware its quite an improvement.

It may not be everyone’s choice, particularly if some package is only available as a snap,
so, the intention of the question is really to see if anyone else has tried and got a faster boot.

Everyone benefits from Linux, there are no losers, except perhaps Microsoft and Satya Nadella

6

Gentle reminder for the whole community:

We don’t bash other OS here.
We don’t bash other organizations here.
We don’t bash people here.

We don’t need to make others look small.
We are better than that.

3 Likes
7

I use snap apps, e.g. Livepatch and fwpud, so for me removing snap isn’t an option.

However, I don’t see startup time as being a problem. I have a five-year-old desktop, 16 GB RAM and an SSD, and it takes under a minute to go from entering the LUKS passphrase to being fully logged in.

On my ancient laptop with 8 GB RAM and a spinning disk, it takes much longer — as does everything else, e.g. Chrome alone takes over a minute to start.

If you’re struggling with a generally slow computer, you might want to consider a lighter distribution, e.g. Xubuntu or Lubuntu, because Ubuntu is specifically designed for a higher-spec computer. (I put up with Ubuntu on my laptop, because once everything has loaded, it’s pretty fast, and I prefer the consistency of having the same distribution on my desktop and laptop.)

In fact, if you want a snapless distribution, you might consider going non-Ubuntu. One of the most popular snap-free flavours of Ubuntu is Linux Mint.

In short, I think that functionality beats a faster boot-up time, because that’s just once. The functionality lasts the entire time you’re using the computer.

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8

Honestly, I don’t notice that having several Snaps installed on any of my computers makes the startup slower, and I have two computers with hardware that is more than 10 years old. It’s possible that Snaps might be a problem on an HDD. My only real problem with Snap in 2025, in truth, is LibreOffice; I don’t understand why it takes so long to start up.

9

You should open a bug about it and attach a timing log for the snap start, you can capture this log with:

snap run --trace-exec libreoffice

(it will print out the values after you closed the app again)

1 Like
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