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- Hacker News
- Snaps are centralized, provided by one company. Sorry, but no. It can be 'better' for some reasons, but free software should not be limited to one or few app stores.by renegat0x0
- From 2023 - is any of this still relevant?by jasonvorhe
- The thing with being around Linux since its early days (Slackware 2.0 in 1996), is that this kind of content regarding Linux Desktop fragmentation and fixes just around the corner gets tiresome.
KDE and GNOME in the 2000's already had everything in place, for vertical application development, frameworks and co, the only part missing was having OEM support for selling ready made systems, instead of reverse engineering hardware all the time.
Instead rebooting the experience, incompatible Gtk+ versions, multiple sound systems, a X Windows replacement that is yet to be widely available,....
Eventually the peace of mind is to use it the headless, time sharing approach that UNIX was developed for, and leave it at it, ssh and Web instead of telnet and X Windows of yore, into servers where OEMs actually care to support their hardware.
by pjmlp - I actually prefer flatpak over snaps if it has been made by original authors of software. Snaps get unusable really fast and have a lot of unexpected problems and inconveniences around the seams.by manvel_hn
- I posted this article three years ago, and some of it is likely due for a rework. Why is it getting brought up again now?by orowith2os
- Flatpak is now an indispensible part of my linux setup on debian or an older ubuntu LTS:
Running up-to-date desktop apps like synology-drive, prusa slicer, keepassxc, kdenlive or even Steam at the same time without any conflicting dependencies and configurations tainting the distribution. And if you do not want to use it any more, you can simply remove it with little or even no traces left behind. I love the experience to get these -- including updates -- from within discover (KDE) or gnome-software.
And don't mix flatpak with snap. Different technology, I share mixed feelings about snaps.
by oflebbe - I do like Flatpak, for the most part, though I wish that the distribution and the sandboxing parts of it were not tied at the hip.
The sandboxing would be an easier sell if it allowed interconnections between apps as appropriate. Yes, I do want KeepassXC to be exposed to the KeepassXC extension in Firefox. Yes, I do want yabridge to expose VST instruments to BitWig. We don't want to be hardcoding support for individual pairs of apps either, so the mechanism would have to be generic.
Abstracting away filesystems also only goes so far. Running Filelight sandboxed for instance is just too slow to be useful.
And the distribution would be an easier sell if it allowed for standalone app downloads without going through a centralized hub with dedicated download tools.
Hopefully these are things we'll eventually see solved. Until then, it's still pretty damn good to be able to install many common apps regardless of distro specifics. An easy thing to take for granted, that. Used to be the answer to installation woes was "what's so hard about tracking down every dev dependency and compiling it yourself?" and it's nice that we're firmly moving on from that.
by Balinares - Every time I tried Flatpak it did not work, always some other problem. Maybe this got fixed nowadays. I did not find it user friendly either, but this could be addressed by the distro. AppImage actually works and is simple, so I use that. Snap is trash because autoupdate cannot be disabled without code changes (what?!) last time I checked.by edg5000