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

[-MacNuke-]

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.

If you do not want to fiddle around with the flatpak command line tool for setting rights, have a look at the flatseal application ( https://flathub.org/apps/details/com...chx84.Flatseal ). It let's you set rights for every flatpak via a nice GUI.

[user1]

appimage:
- auto-mounted every time you launch it (slow first startup)

Yesterday I tried Libreoffice appimage and it launched instantly the very first time. I can't say the same about Snaps. The very first time you launch them, they are god awfully slow. And they still suffer from slow startups after every cold boot or restart.

[Vistaus]

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.

I was critical of AppImages in the past, but now I actually prefer them 1000x over Flatpaks and 100.000x over Snaps. AppImage needs to become more popular, for sure!

[jntesteves]

For some time, I've considered Canonical to be effectively harmful to Linux. Snapcraft is the ultimate example, proprietary BS that takes control over the OS from users and puts it into corporate hands. The kind of Microsoft crap I would steer miles away from.

At this point, I never recommend Ubuntu to newcomers anymore. I instead usually recommend the distros that come with Flathub by default, or Fedora + setting up Flathub.

[Vistaus]

Fuck you Canonical with the whole Snap crap!
You're obsessed with taking control from the users on their computers.

Windows is still pretty open and actually works offline. Don't you mean Apple? If anyone's tightening the screws, it's Apple on macOS. And macOS also doesn't work properly offline when Apple's servers are down, as proven last year when there was an outage at Apple and people couldn't really use macOS anymore until Apple's servers were up again.
Windows is far from perfect, and I would not even touch it with a stick, but at least Microsoft is giving a lot more freedom to users than Apple.

[Vistaus]

It was not. Both projects started in late 2014, just a few weeks apart . Flatpak (xdg-app back then) was based on Alex Larsson's experiments with portable apps that went all the way to 2000s.

Exactly! And while we're going down memory lane: anyone remember Autopackage?

[Vistaus]

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

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

I have no idea what you're talking about. There's not a single distro I've come across where AppImages don't work.

[user1]

Windows is still pretty open and actually works offline. Don't you mean Apple? If anyone's tightening the screws, it's Apple on macOS. And macOS also doesn't work properly offline when Apple's servers are down, as proven last year when there was an outage at Apple and people couldn't really use macOS anymore until Apple's servers were up again.
Windows is far from perfect, and I would not even touch it with a stick, but at least Microsoft is giving a lot more freedom to users than Apple.

Agree. At least Windows is more open in a sense of good legacy / 32 bit support. MacOS on the other hand, with the complete drop of 32 bit software support, the switch to Apple silicon, deprecation of OpenGL and other stuff, feels more and more like a mobile walled garden.

[-MacNuke-]

the app have to depends on a specific runtime version (at least freedesktop-XX =~300MB), ie: self-contained package.
I don't have to build Qt myself on Windows/macOS, but I ship only the required libs with my app.
The issue is that flatpak/snap doesn't have an equivalent to windeployqt/macdeployqt, so you have two choices:
- build Qt yourself (It took hours), and extract the required runtime libs/plugins yourself.
- Use their bloated Qt.

The runtime size get's pretty irrelevant if you install a bunch of apps since it is a single dependency for most apps. If every appimage comes with every dependency it needs they overtake the disc usage of a flatpak runtime pretty fast. You are acting like every flatpak needs its own runtime. In the end you are complaining about just a few MB of disc space when comparing a practical installation with several apps installed which takes a couple of GB.

You are not wrong for sure but it is corner case nitpicking over a couple of MB. edit: And you are missing the advantage that the Flatpak runtime comes with modern Mesa. So you will get up-to-date mesa drivers on distributions that are lacking them.

[arun54321]

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

Don't know about a thing, never used it. so it must be a crap!