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

[Weasel]

Professionals

are less than 2% of the desktop market.

[Vistaus]

It's actually kind of strange that AppImage doesn't get more traction 'cause if I'm to believe this forum, then it should have lots and lots supporters.

[grok]

How do you open and read files from a flatpak application?
I ask because the only one flatpak application I tried is dosbox. Pointless but this was a test that didn't cost hundreds megabytes. When running it it's kind of walled off in its chroot such that I didn't know how to mount a directory with a few games.

Is it useful in a live distro? If so I'll include a VLC .flatpak on disk (but this'll eat hundreds of megabytes of ramdisk, unless there's a way it'll read data in place)
I should just try things out but I'm asking anyway. What I think is the bigger concern is how well flatpaks or snaps or omgbbqs will work with users who don't know much about computers.

[totex71]

Linux will never compete with Windows and MacOS on the desktop for more reasons than just packaging, first is poor driver support where some hardware works, some doesn't, and some works with half the features missing, even when it works you never know if it will continue working on the next kernel update. Or when it works the performance or features are lacking compared to Windows. Second reason is that no matter the packaging Linux applications are sometimes great, but quite often subpar in quality and stability plus the major disadvantage of not having professional software like Adobe Photoshop, CorelDraw, Cubase Audio, Microsoft Office etc on Linux.

And before anyone starts with "but there are open source alternatives just as good", nope they are not just as good, some come close such as Gimp, but most cant compete with proprietary software. Even if it could nobody would care because no one wants to learn a completely new workflow just to use Linux when their Windows or MacOS does the job fine already. Professionals value time and they wouldn't learn a new OS and new application workflows just to use Linux, there is no point to it, sure they could save money but if they are professionals they are already making money and saving a few hundred dollars is not enough incentive for them to waste weeks or months to learn something completely new. But since open source applications cant compete with proprietary applications 9 times out of 10 that was a hypothetical scenario anyway.

Nobody really cares about Linux desktop outside Linux community, there is no money to be made off of it so nobody invests much into applications for Linux desktop. And users dont care as well, 99% of users out there dont give a crap about open source, software freedom etc. They want their computer to work as intended and do the job it needs to do. Linux desktop will stay a niche OS on the desktop for 2% of users, out of those 2% only perhaps 0.5% are hardcore Linux users that stay on it always, other 1.5% are fluctuating users, those that come and stay for a while and then move back to Windows or MacOS, and newcomers.

Dear god get a hobby or something xD. You clearly have no clue what you are talking about...
Also if windows is going to dominate forever like you say, then why are you trying so hard to defend it? Why do you even care then?
The only thing windows is good for is scamming people. Not saying you are one of those people but that is the only explanation i have left that someone would even try to defend windows in 2018.

[ssokolow]

I skimmed those posts. I couldn't see any arguments or evidence to suggest that this would be a bad idea for GoG either now or in the future. Your only relevant comments seemed to be:

As someone who really hopes Flatpak takes over the world, I can give an honest problem with it that someone more rational pointed out on the GOG forums:

As it was explained to me, Flatpak is currently not well-suited to games because the OpenGL (and probably Vulkan, given that it's a libraries issue) exposed to sandboxed apps lags behind what's available on the system at large.

[ssokolow]

+1 for AppImage: it's the most sane solution.

You guys who want a centralized repository crack me up. People want to get away from that crap on Windows (MS's store), Android & iOS (especially the latter) since they'll have to depend on the whims of the companies accepting their code. And yet they praise that garbage on Linux for "security"? That's the exact same rhetoric every centralized store re-iterates, ever.

I don't care about Flathub. My reason for wanting Flatpak is so Linux can catch up to the sandboxing features present in Android's APK system. (On the Android devices I use for testing my web creations, I run F-Droid as my package repository... which is still APK-based.)

Heck, one of my goals is to use the Flatpak launcher to run existing applications installed via other means in sandboxes.

Most notably, Flatpak has "Portals" which are supported by things like GTK+ and Qt, so just running something in Flatpak, even with a sandboxing policy of "allow everything", is enough to get KDE's Open/Save dialogs (with support for application-specific entries in the Places sidebar) in GTK+ 3.x applications.

[ssokolow]

How do you open and read files from a flatpak application?
I ask because the only one flatpak application I tried is dosbox. Pointless but this was a test that didn't cost hundreds megabytes. When running it it's kind of walled off in its chroot such that I didn't know how to mount a directory with a few games.

There are two ways to do it:

1. The Flatpak launcher supports mounting parts of the host filesystem into the sandbox. This is accomplished via command-line arguments which can also be specified in the finish-args section of the manifest files.
2. Flatpak has what are known as "Portals": D-Bus APIs that allow a sandboxed application to request that trusted code prompt the user for something. One of the portals is the file-chooser portal (transparently supported by recent GTK+ and Qt versions), which pops up the desktop's native Open/Save dialog and then mounts the selected file/folder into the sandbox and returns a path to the application if the user chooses OK.

[cybertraveler]

Thanks for the comments ssokolow. You seem reasonable.

Re the graphics libs issue you mentioned. Do you know if flatpak'd apps can access and use system libraries? I know this would make them more dependent on specific operating systems, but when we're dealing with games there are always going to be more specific system requirements than something like a text editor or a bittorrent client. Even on Windows games can require specific hardware accelerated DirectX versions which not all users will have a Windows version or a graphics card that supports it.

[the_scx]

Why can't GoG.com adopt flatpak? What's your reasoning? Simply saying that no one is currently distributing games using it, isn't a reason why GoG.com couldn't adopt it in the future.

First of all, if GOG decides to extend its support for Linux (and they are not in a hurry with this), the first thing it will do is release GOG Galaxy on this system. This in turn excludes use of any system package managing, like rpm (RPM), dpkg (DEB), flatpak (Flatpak), Snappy (Snap), etc. At this point I could actually end, but I will give a few more arguments:
- In business, you usually avoid things that require time and effort, but don't bring tangible benefits.
- Games on GOG are mostly distro-independent (or at least they try to be, but this is another story). This is not because the GOG is so great, but just because they avoid problematic titles, due to the lack of something similar to Steam Runtime. However, the only officially supported distributions are current Ubuntu LTS distros (currently 14.04, 16.04 and 18.04). This would mean having to test every single game against Freedesktop 1.6 runtime.
- For developers, creating flatpak packages is much more problematic than taking care of compatibility with Ubuntu.
- Using flatpak means no support for mods, patches, lang packs, etc.
- Flatpak would be very problematic when it comes to DLC (downloadable content).
- Users do not care about security. This is not something you can sell to players. What's more, the end user does not know if the flatpak package is sandboxed or not. If it has access to the home directory (yes, it can - see: sandbox permissions), it can do the same damage as any other software.
- Ubuntu users are the target group of GOG. However, Flatpak is not installed by default in Ubuntu.
- Before starting the flatpaked game, you must install Flatpak in your system, add the Flathub repository, install Freedesktop runtime and finally install the game itself. It might be not so easy for unfamiliar users.
- Even if they decided to offer flatpak packages, people would complain that they actually prefer AppImage.

[ssokolow]

Thanks for the comments ssokolow. You seem reasonable.

Re the graphics libs issue you mentioned. Do you know if flatpak'd apps can access and use system libraries? I know this would make them more dependent on specific operating systems, but when we're dealing with games there are always going to be more specific system requirements than something like a text editor or a bittorrent client. Even on Windows games can require specific hardware accelerated DirectX versions which not all users will have a Windows version or a graphics card that supports it.

I haven't looked into it in detail yet but, given how Flatpak works, I'm assuming it's just a case of "You could... but that sort of defeats the purpose".

(I'll look into it once I've cleared out enough of my project backlog to get back to the game launcher prototype I'm developing as a test bed for features like heuristic detection/inference of game metadata without querying a service like Steam and "do what I mean" use of Flatpak to prevent games like the GOG release of The Escapists from doodling all over $HOME.)