Flatpak's XDG-Desktop-Portal Adds Initial Support For Snaps

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Flatpak's XDG-Desktop-Portal Adds Initial Support For Snaps

Released yesterday was version 0.11 of the XDG Desktop Portal and with this release comes initial support for Snap packages...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XDG-Desktop-Portal-Snapped

[RealNC]

My experience with flatpak has been negative so far. Applications do not integrate at will my desktop, and they seem to run slower. PulseEffects for example skips audio all the time AND looks wrong, but a native install is flawless and looks like a native application.

Why did they ruin the packaging by sandboxing?

[ChristianSchaller]

My experience with flatpak has been negative so far. Applications do not integrate at will my desktop, and they seem to run slower. PulseEffects for example skips audio all the time AND looks wrong, but a native install is flawless and looks like a native application.

Why did they ruin the packaging by sandboxing?

Ignoring the loaded term 'ruin' here, the motivation for sandboxing is improving security. Also by decoupling your applications from the host OS you enable application developers to have a more predictable target on Linux and thus makes supporting Linux a lot easier.

Getting the integration perfect is an ongoing effort. I don't know when last you tried, but theming for instance should be better these days with Flatpak already including support for the major default themes used by the biggest distros. Flatpak also do support adding more themes through runtime extensions if people are interested. Font integration have also been improved recently, to ensure that the flatpak is able to use your system fonts and respect the fontconfig settings of those fonts.

[Vistaus]

My experience with flatpak has been negative so far. Applications do not integrate at will my desktop, and they seem to run slower. PulseEffects for example skips audio all the time AND looks wrong, but a native install is flawless and looks like a native application.

Why did they ruin the packaging by sandboxing?

My experience is the other way around: with Snap applications run slower and aren't integrated at all (even the fonts look distorted in most Snap apps I've tried). Flatpak apps, on the other hand, run flawlessly. My only complaint is that Flathub needs a local cache of all of the available packages, which takes up >1.5 GB (I know, I know, who cares these days? Well I do, my SSD ain't that big, so it is a problem for *me*).

[cynical]

My experience is the other way around

My experience is the other away around still: I'm using Telegram and Slack snaps, and they blend in perfectly in Ubuntu. The only apps I have a problem with are Qt5 apps, and themes for them are broken even on apt installs. I don't particularly care about snap or flatpak, but both apps I use showed up as snaps by default in the Ubuntu software center, and it was awesome to just install them and not even have to know anything about packaging for them to work as expected.

It's just a great experience for users that aren't security-conscious, or don't want to have to know about PPAs to get the latest version of what they use. I'm glad Canonical took the step of promoting them in their store.

[starshipeleven]

Why did they ruin the packaging by sandboxing?

Because if you allow installation from untrusted sources (i.e. not the distro's repos) and you don't have decent sandboxing then you might as well just pipe some obfuscated script into your bash while running as root (yes VMWare I'm looking at you) and hope for the best.

[starshipeleven]

My experience is the other way around: with Snap applications run slower and aren't integrated at all (even the fonts look distorted in most Snap apps I've tried). Flatpak apps, on the other hand, run flawlessly. My only complaint is that Flathub needs a local cache of all of the available packages, which takes up >1.5 GB (I know, I know, who cares these days? Well I do, my SSD ain't that big, so it is a problem for *me*).

Can you symlink that folder to somewhere else? Like a SDcard or whatever. I always have a random crap 32GB SDcard in my laptop to be used as "scratch space" where all downloads and other oddball stuff goes by default, even if I have 2x 512GB SSDs in RAID1 (with btrfs) so I don't lack space at all.

[RealNC]

My experience is the other way around: with Snap ...

Eh? That's not "the other way around." I never tried Snap. I was comparing flatpak with native installations into /usr through the package manager or *.bin installer packages.

[RealNC]

Because if you allow installation from untrusted sources

What if I only want to install from trusted sources?

This is just stupid. The sandboxing makes the applications look like ass. It's just plain broken. It should be optional. If you sign the packages, then I can decide for myself who is a trusted source.

[starshipeleven]

What if I only want to install from trusted sources?

Get a decent rolling release distro and use traditional package managers. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is the one I use and recommend.

This is just stupid. The sandboxing makes the applications look like ass.

As the other guy already told you, sandboxing per-se does not prevent proper theming of applications, it just prevents the usual way of theming them (as they don't communicate with the rest of the system), and they are already working on ways to integrate them properly with the system's overall theme without breaking the sandbox.

So this isn't going to be an issue forever.