I have been using the snap versions of Chromium, Discord, CLion and Spotify for a while now and I haven't noticed any slowness whatsoever. Sure the applications need some seconds (at most 5) to start up on a freshly booted machine but other than that it's pretty snappy (heh). The only issue I have encountered so far is that some applications don't respect the environments cursor theme (looking at you Spotify and Postman) but that's easily fixable by the package maintainers. Other than that I really don't understand the hate-train for snap. Coming from Arch Linux, PPAs seem like a PITA to me and an elegant solution such as the AUR doesn't exist in the Ubuntu ecosystem so snap / flatpak are the next closest thing to it.
Most applications on Macs start up instantaneously these days. 5 seconds is 50 times the limit for "instantaneous" feel. [1]
All of the raging discussions in this thread would be totally absent if Canonical had taken the time to make apps installed with snaps fast. Unfortunately, these days, the "make it work, make it right, make it fast" mantra seems to stop at the "make it work". At least the 20.04 release seems to be at that stage.
Congratulations, you just got a bunch of users who are going to avoid updates even more because you are going to make everything slower with your shiny new release.
No, most apps are slow the first time they are run on Mac (not as bad as first run of snap though, usually). After that, pretty fast. AppStore apps seem to always be fast.
I got sick of it after six years or so and moved to Linux Mint. (This was before Manjaro was widely visible.) Been on Mint ever since: it's a better Ubuntu than Ubuntu, and a better Windows than Windows (for ordinary uses).
Note that Mint 20, although based on Ubuntu 2004, has removed snap from the base install. `apt install chromium-browser' takes you to a web page explaining why.
