A Look At Flatpak vs. Snap Adoption In Various 2018 Linux Distributions

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Look At Flatpak vs. Snap Adoption In Various 2018 Linux Distributions

KDE developer Markus Slopianka has looked at the state of Flatpak and Snap application deployment/sandboxing technologies across the state of several Linux distributions...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Snap-vs-Flatpak-2018-Distros

[TumultuousUnicorn]

Too bad he isn't considering AppImage.

Personally, I don't use this kind of applications: I find all I need on Arch Linux official repositories and AUR. With AUR, I can check PKGBUILD and sources before building the package.
But with binary files, like AppImage, how we can trust the application?

[pracedru]

Flatpak is awesome IMO.
Not only does it ease the workload on developers. It should make it possible to have better backwards compatibility than Windows for all Linux distributions. It might even be possible to have forward compatibility, such that old distro’s can run software that didn’t exist when they where released. This is the killer feature for IT production in almost any business that runs MS products.

[Space Beer]

I had some issues with Flatpak. Even though it was installed from flathub, some packages were missing and the prgoram couldn't run. I still think AppImage is the best way, i.e. most convinient for users.

Regarding trust - there are many closed-source linux programs i use, so I don't care how those will distributed. Regarding FOSS - I would rather have it in AppImage or Flatpak format if it works well, than from the repo or source if it is always broken and missing something

[geearf]

I also don't get the lack of mention of AppImage.

[Danny3]

I only like distributed and independent formats like AppImage.
I don't want to open each distro's custom app store, which most of the time is slow, wait for download on each OS reinstall or new computer.
AppImage is great, too bad the KDE Plasma has no support for it
I meand there's no "Make executable and run it" and no "Do you want to install it permanently?" qustion popups like in other DEs.
Not sure exactly where I've seen this kind of support, but it was very nice!

[woprandi]

Too bad he isn't considering AppImage.

Personally, I don't use this kind of applications: I find all I need on Arch Linux official repositories and AUR. With AUR, I can check PKGBUILD and sources before building the package.
But with binary files, like AppImage, how we can trust the application?

With flatpak you can override default app permisions if you don't trust it

[the_scx]

Flatpak support for RHEL 7 is... well... limited. RHEL 7.5 (2018-04-10) provides Flatpak 0.8.8.

https://git.centos.org/summary/rpms!flatpak.git

Flatpak 0.10.4 will be available in RHEL 7.6, sometime in mid-2019.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1570030

It is true that there is a COPR test repository (amigadave/flatpak-epel7) that provides newer versions of flatpak (x86-64 only). However, this repo is known to replace base packages and for obvious reasons it is not supported by Red Hat.

https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/amigadave/flatpak-epel7

And Flathub maintainers do not care about older versions of Flatpak at all. For example, both GNOME Builder and flatpak-builder require Flatpak 0.10.0.

https://github.com/flathub/org.flatpak.Builder/blob/a4f3f8139e990994bd1e734776f4a915ebe4481a/org.flatpak.Builder.json#L9

https://github.com/flathub/org.gnome.Builder/blob/39aba879d0aedd36f9a0a6978adb36904ba6e771/org.gnome.Builder.json#L8

What is worse, if you want to publish your flatpak package on the Flathub, they will literally force you to use features from newer versions of flatpak/flatpak-builder (even if it is not necessary), like "cmake-ninja" or "simple" buildsystem, "build-commands", etc. If you refuse, your app submission will be probably rejected.

As for the disadvantages of Flatpak, I have listed them here:

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/linux-gaming/1027380-feral-s-former-linux-team-lead-is-now-working-for-unity?p=1027838#post1027838

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/linux-gaming/1027380-feral-s-former-linux-team-lead-is-now-working-for-unity?p=1029651#post1029651

[cybertraveler]

I only like distributed and independent formats like AppImage.
I don't want to open each distro's custom app store, which most of the time is slow, wait for download on each OS reinstall or new computer.

You can download and install a .flatpak file (I think they call it a 'single file bundle') without having to integrate their flatpak repository. Developer details here:

http://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/publishing.html

So if a company like GoG.com was to start using flatpak tech, they could just make it possible for users to download the individual game.flatpak files from the download page the same way they download a game-installer.exe/msi file for windows.

[the_scx]

So if a company like GoG.com was to start using flatpak tech, they could just make it possible for users to download the individual game.flatpak files from the download page the same way they download a game-installer.exe/msi file for windows.

I have already explained to you why this will never happen.

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/linux-gaming/1027380-feral-s-former-linux-team-lead-is-now-working-for-unity?p=1027838#post1027838

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/linux-gaming/1027380-feral-s-former-linux-team-lead-is-now-working-for-unity?p=1029651#post1029651