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Canonical To Focus On A New, More Modular Snapcraft - Current Codebase Goes Legacy

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  • #21
    They should just reboot Snapcraft as a Canonical-managed Flatpak repo, same as they did with Mir and Wayland.

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    • #22
      Originally posted by jonkoops View Post
      I don't really have any preference between Snaps, Flatpak and AppImage (I use Flatpaks because I am on Fedora). But I feel like there is such a strong 'not invented here' vibe around these initiatives. Instead of fixing the portability of applications between distro's this seems to only further exacerbate the fragmentation issue over seemingly trivial technicalities from an end-user perspective.
      The vibe is entirely Ubuntu's and their focus on constantly reinventing the wheel kills the user experience.

      Back around 10.04 they had a "thousand papercuts" initiative to squash minor, common, irritating headaches. Maybe instead of inventing Yet Another New Thing they could do that?

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      • #23
        Originally posted by user1 View Post
        Does anyone notice that Appimages are a bit more underrated compared to Snaps and Flatpaks? I actually had the best experience with them probably because they are not sandboxed, so they don't have all the issues that are caused by sandboxing, from which both Snaps and Flatpaks suffer. They also usually take less disk space. But I guess that the fact that they aren't sandboxed is precisely the reason there is less attention to Appimages.
        and hence they are not sandboxed, they run on less distros.

        They fall apart when you don't use an Ubuntu/Debian based distro.

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        • #24
          Originally posted by Britoid View Post

          and hence they are not sandboxed, they run on less distros.

          They fall apart when you don't use an Ubuntu/Debian based distro.
          Technically, it's not the sandboxing or lack thereof that's the problem there. It's that it's up to each app maintainer to figure out what to bundle into their package, as opposed to the developers of Appimage maintaining an analogue to the Steam Runtime like the Flatpak people do.

          You can certainly do it without sandboxing like GOG games do, just by playing around with LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

          Heck, even GOG screws up sometimes. I occasionally have to delete a bundled .so file to after upgrading Ubuntu (not Arch or Fedora or Slackware... Ubuntu) in order to stop a game from segfaulting on startup. Flatpak runtimes or the Steam Runtime provide a centralized place for that to be done for you.
          Last edited by ssokolow; 07 January 2022, 10:56 AM.

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          • #25
            Originally posted by user1 View Post
            Does anyone notice that Appimages are a bit more underrated compared to Snaps and Flatpaks? I actually had the best experience with them...
            My personal experience with AppImages was the opposite. Some tended to SEGFAULT on launch, with no apparent way to debug the issues. No centralized way to manage updates, so some apps auto updated on launch while others required manual checking and re-downloading.. And updating meant redownloading the entire bundle as opposed to incremental updates in Flatpak or modular updates in distro-provided packages. Plus they felt alien, residing in some random directory (eg. ~/Downloads) as opposed to an out-of-sight system directory. In my personal experience, AppImages are an example of software packaging done wrong.

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            • #26
              Originally posted by Setif

              I have an app which I have packages for different OSs:
              snap: many dependencies =~ 350MBs (core20+kde-framewroks-5-15-3)
              flatpak: many dependencies =~ 700MBs (freedesktop-21-08+kde-runtime-5.15-21.08+other deps)
              appimage: 72MBs (runs only on glibc>glibc-ubuntu-18.04)
              Windows/NSIS: 27MB
              macOS/DMG: 14MB
              Are you seriously comparing install size vs Windows? This must be a joke... Windows comes with dozens of gigabytes of BS installed by default. Sure, it doesn't need to install a few more dependencies: it's already using 100GB of space. IT BETTER NOT INSTALL MUCH ELSE FFS.

              I don't know about mac, never used that crap.

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              • #27
                Originally posted by higgslagrangian View Post
                Windows comes with dozens of gigabytes
                I don't know something comes preinstalled on Windows beside Windows-API Libraries.
                Does Windows come with Python and Qt preinstalled?

                it's already using 100GB of space.
                Wow!!
                That never happened. The minimum storage required for Windows 11 is 32GB.

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                • #28
                  For me all three solutions have worked fine (as a end user). The one major issue I had with snap and flatpak is for software that needs access to arbitrary things. For example vscode: I want to be able to open a file from any directory. This is obviously at odds with sandboxing.

                  Same goes for FreeCAD: it has so many optional dependencies that it can use. Thus sandboxing becomes a problem (so I use AppImage for it). For example I need it to be able to execute OpenSCAD and some mesh simplification tools and so on.

                  I haven't had issues with AppImages not working on non-ubuntu/debian, but then I use Arch so I likely have new libraries anyway.

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                  • #29
                    Originally posted by user1 View Post
                    Does anyone notice that Appimages are a bit more underrated compared to Snaps and Flatpaks? I actually had the best experience with them probably because they are not sandboxed, so they don't have all the issues that are caused by sandboxing, from which both Snaps and Flatpaks suffer. They also usually take less disk space. But I guess that the fact that they aren't sandboxed is precisely the reason there is less attention to Appimages.
                    Yes, I had the best experience too with AppImages.
                    I like that they're so portable.
                    I like that I can put them on a pendrive and they will work on any Linux computer or that I can just copy back the folder with them after I reinstall the OS and they will instantly work.
                    I like that they also have embedded icons and they display just fin in Dolphin on KDE.
                    Gives a very good user experience, similar to Windows.

                    As for Snaps I don't like them at all!
                    Flatpaks are better but I don't know where is this security feature called sandbox as I have never seen any pop-up window asking me to grant some permission or not.
                    I assume that all of them just come will all permissions allowed which defeats the whole purpose of a sandbox and security and I don't know why some people insist that they are more secure than AppImage when they can just access anything without any restrictions and questions asked.

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                    • #30
                      Originally posted by Setif
                      but After dealing with them I discovered that no one of them offer what Windows and macOS installers offer.
                      You mean you miss to give random scripts from someone root access to your operating system? Windows installers are basically the unix equivalent of "curl http://my.script | sudo bash". No thank you.

                      Also you are wrong on the flatpak side. The developer can ship whatever library he wants. Nobody forces you to use the library from the runtime. Runtimes are just an offer so you do not have to deal with _every_ dependency.

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