Gotta be honest, as a dev I tried to make a Flatpack of my app and gave up. Making a snap was much easier. Of course, I also offer it as a .deb, .rpm, Pacman package, etc. too
. . . the main issues boil down to concerns over some parts of the Snap ecosystem being closed source, Canonical’s ongoing efforts to try to get some of the Red Hat “premium linux” money, and arguments that other solutions (e.g. flatpaks and appimages) are “just as good, if not better”. And it doesn’t help that Canonical/Ubuntu is increasingly pushing snap as “the only solution” for some applications.
When you speak of no single One True Way and things being completely open source, Canonical/Ubuntu have already left the chat.
I still don’t even know what problem snap and flatpak were intended to solve. Just apt or dnf installing from the command line, or even using the distro provided store app, has always been sufficient for me.
Modern Linux distros tend to have configuration and dependency issues where certain packages if installed the “Linux Way” doesn’t completely work as desired at times depending on the distro or even a desktop spin (which might have different default libraries installed than the “main” one). Flatpak is a single configuration meant to work one single way across all distributions and has become more of a standard, usable way for Linux applications to just work.
Use Flatpak. Easy to install and easy to tweak from flatseal or similar GUI Flatpak permission tweakers if you want more flexibility at the possible cost of security.
It’s slow, forced by Canonical, and starts a pointless format war with Flatpack.
Flatpack isn’t without its own quirks and flaws. There is no One True Way. Being open-source, there shouldn’t be one.
It is definitely slow though, mostly on first run.
Gotta be honest, as a dev I tried to make a Flatpack of my app and gave up. Making a snap was much easier. Of course, I also offer it as a .deb, .rpm, Pacman package, etc. too
There should be one way for sandboxed shit, since the alternative of package managers already exists
We don’t need snap, app image, flatpak all to compete. We need shit that just works
There’s a bunch of different package managers too. It all just kinda works.
The way you get “shit that just works” is through iteration and competition.
If we just decide that the first solution to get any market share is the solution for all time? Uhm… hello Windows?
Okay, we tried appimage and it didn’t work, so the second iteration as flatpak is mostly functional
you don’t need ENDLESS competition of formats
Yeah, that. That’s exactly the problem. To quote @Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever above, who put it much better than I could:
When you speak of no single One True Way and things being completely open source, Canonical/Ubuntu have already left the chat.
I still don’t even know what problem snap and flatpak were intended to solve. Just apt or dnf installing from the command line, or even using the distro provided store app, has always been sufficient for me.
Modern Linux distros tend to have configuration and dependency issues where certain packages if installed the “Linux Way” doesn’t completely work as desired at times depending on the distro or even a desktop spin (which might have different default libraries installed than the “main” one). Flatpak is a single configuration meant to work one single way across all distributions and has become more of a standard, usable way for Linux applications to just work.
Use Flatpak. Easy to install and easy to tweak from flatseal or similar GUI Flatpak permission tweakers if you want more flexibility at the possible cost of security.