Problem Description:
Libre Office 25.8.4.2 opens very slowly and causes the cooling to howl up. Obviously I use the snap version. But in the whisker menu, the older version I’ve had installed, prior to the one from the official AppCenter,
appears as well. Strange … can it be installed several times in parallel? How can I switch to the (probably faster) non-snap version and get it back to a useful response start up time? Thanks
What I’ve Tried:
I’ve tried >time libreoffice --writer<, and the result was
Yes, you can indeed install LibreOffice twice, once from snap and once from the standard repositories.
In fact, you can install it more than twice!
Which version do you wish to keep? I would uninstall the version that you don’t want to keep.
You’re saying that LibreOffice is slow. It would help to know your computer’s specifications. Snap is great, but on old low-spec hardware, it can indeed be slow, particularly on first launch after booting.
You can either disable the snap version of LibreOffice or uninstall it.
To disable:
$ sudo snap disable libreoffice
This removes the associated snap LibreOffice .desktop files so those (25.x) LibreOffice programs won’t appear in launchers, docks, menus, etc. You may have to log out of your desktop session and back in for the changes to take effect.
To uninstall:
$ sudo snap remove libreoffice
The remove command by itself will create a snapshot of all data for the snap including a user’s data directory in ~/snap/. This is in case if the snap is reinstalled later and a user’s settings data needs to be restored.
To remove a snap without creating a snapshot add the “–purge” option to the command-line.
On my system, the startup time for the snap version of LibreOffice is noticeably slower than the deb version from Ubuntu repository or the one from LibreOffice itself, but not horribly slower:
$ /usr/bin/time -p /usr/bin/libreoffice ←Ubuntu version real 1.05 user 0.35 sys 0.11
$ /usr/bin/time -p snap run libreoffice← Snap version real 4.30 user 3.40 sys 0.41
Not exactly sure why its slower, but I think the snap version has to do more to set up its running environment than the deb versions do. In which case, I don’t think there’s going to be any easy way to improve performance other upgrading hardware.
I see, so I have really done that. A biit useless So maybe it’s the best thing to get rid of both and then install the latest build, but the non-snap version.
Yes, your guess was right, indeed my system is quite old. It’s a T480s from Lenovo. An i5-8250U CPU with 24GB RAM and a Samsung 990 PRO 2TB SSD.
I see, thanks. So then I probably will try to remove/uninstall both versions, with the “-purge”-option, and make a fresh installation of the latest deb version. The fact that your Ubuntu version shows time values around 1s only makes me feel optimistic as well Despite my rather antiquated system.
Funny enough, I had almost the exact same issue some time ago, but with VLC
I installed it from the App Center, not realizing I somehow ended up with both the Snap and the apt version installed at the same time.
Once I removed the Snap version and kept only the apt one, everything went back to normal and startup time improved a lot.
LibreOffice can indeed be installed in parallel (Snap + deb), so it might be worth removing the Snap version and switching fully to the non-Snap package to see if that solves the slowdown.
The snapd developers have published data showing that snap-packaged applications should be opening just as fast that applications packaged other ways. The snap-is-slower myth refuses to die, but is nonetheless a myth.
If a snap-packaged application is demonstrably and repeatably slower, that’s not normal. It’s a bug.
Please double-check that the problem can be reliably reproduced, then report the issue to the snap developers at snapcraft.io.
I think snapcraft.io is the correct url unless those minecraft server admins at snapcraft.net are working on packaging apps for snaps in their spare time.
There’s already a bug filed about the LibreOffice slow startup here: LibreOffice Snap extremely slow to launch. OP can log on to launchpad and click the flame to increase the bug heat and/or leave a comment.
In my experience, the LibreOffice snap is much slower than the deb version. Maybe my PC is old, it is, in fact. The deb takes about 3 seconds to launch, while the snap takes around 13 seconds. This isn’t a myth; if it were a bug, it would be easy to see just by launching LibreOffice and observing how slow it is. I value snaps and I can tolerate the slowness in exchange for other benefits, but I don’t want to be told that what I’m clearly experiencing isn’t true. Thank you.
Hopefully it’s just an outlier you are experiencing. I just checked mine & have not seen this. I use the snap LO on 3 laptops, 1 desktop & 2 VMs. My systems stay pretty lean and of course updated. But I must admit, not a power LO user here.
Yes, it can be reproduced reliably. So I will see wether I can report that issue after getting rid of it. It was not like that from the beginning. About 2 yrs ago, all was fine. So I guess it’s really connected with the change to the snap version.
Meanwhile I got rid of both former installations. Funny enough I had no snap version installed, but 2 deb package versions. I have uninstalled both.
First I uninstalled all LibreOffice packages with the app manager. The uninstallation of several of them stopped during the process. So I had to kill the app manager, start it again and continue with other packages.
Then I removed all LibreOffice packages using “sudo apt purge libreoffice*”.
Afterwards I checked for remaining LibreOffice packages in a terminal with dpkg and uninstalled all of them. So I was more or less sure to have cleaned all LibreOffice content. I downloaded the deb installation archives of the latest version and installed them.
After starting up, everything looks pretty good again. A check using “$ time libreoffice25.8” returned the values below. So … I guess it’s ok now.
So maybe it’s the best thing to get rid of both and then install the latest build, but the non-snap version.
Despite my rather antiquated system.
