Comment Re:Snap packages are great but (Score 2) 139
Disclaimer, I work for Canonical and worked with the VLC devs on the snap.
The snap of VLC is nearer 190MB, not 700MB for data-transfer and on-disk size comparisons. All snaps are loop-mounted squashfs files. What you are "du"ing is the mounted read-only files. The actual snap file is in `/var/lib/snapd/snaps/` and on my system is 189MB. The snap contains not only VLC but a bunch of libraries of course. However the bulk of the space (300MB uncompressed) is taken up by VLC plugins which make the snap a great out of the box experience of many users, whatever their use case.
Sure we need to optimise startup time, and that work is ongoing. We could certainly trim the snap down a bit, and I will be looking at that when I'm back from vacation.