Spotify Tops Ubuntu's Snap Store Downloads While GIMP Tops Flatpak's Flathub

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Spotify Tops Ubuntu's Snap Store Downloads While GIMP Tops Flatpak's Flathub

At the end of 2018, Canonical's Alan Pope shared the most popular Snap packages for 2018. Now there's a similar list out of the folks maintaining Flathub for Flatpak packages. The list of popular applications is quite different between these app sandboxing/distribution means...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Flathub-vs-Snap-Store-Apps

[kusma]

That tweet lists the top graphics applications, not overall...

[Ronshere]

The popular flatpak list is kind of similar assuming these are listed in order of their downloads. https://flathub.org/apps/collection/popular But I am impressed with the amount and quality of the flatpak apps.

[lumks]

my guess on the top flatpaks are:

1-3: Discord
1-3: Spotify
1-3: Steam

4-6: Visual Studio Code
4-6: Libreoffice
4-6: Telegram

7-10: Slack
7-10: Skype
7-10: Gimp
7-10: Gnome Builder

[oyvind]

A huge bummer with some of the snaps I've tested on Ubuntu so far: apps unable to read files/dirs outside of my home directory. Which makes it interesting when I keep lots of media content on separate partitions mounted elsewhere and want to use VLC [snap package] to play it. I understand the security sandboxing features are in place, but this restriction is just crippling, having locally running apps only able to read stuff in my home directory, even though unix permissions allow reading much more on the system.

[Brisse]

oyvind Snaps can be configured to access your home folder if needed. It's configured by whoever packaged that particular snap. If you think they may have made an error, maybe you should contact them and point it out.

https://docs.snapcraft.io/the-home-interface/7838

[Weasel]

oyvind Snaps can be configured to access your home folder if needed.

You completely missed his point, he wants it outside the home folder.

[jo-erlend]

A huge bummer with some of the snaps I've tested on Ubuntu so far: apps unable to read files/dirs outside of my home directory.

That's annoying indeed, but you can just bind mount the wanted folders, so it's not a total disaster, just a tad unfriendly to the average user

[the_scx]

A huge bummer with some of the snaps I've tested on Ubuntu so far: apps unable to read files/dirs outside of my home directory. Which makes it interesting when I keep lots of media content on separate partitions mounted elsewhere and want to use VLC [snap package] to play it. I understand the security sandboxing features are in place, but this restriction is just crippling, having locally running apps only able to read stuff in my home directory, even though unix permissions allow reading much more on the system.

Flathub maintainers are trying to enforce even more restrictions on new packages, e.g. access only to xdg-pictures ("$XDG_PICTURES_DIR", default "$HOME/Pictures") for graphic utilities, access only to xdg-music ("$XDG_MUSIC_DIR", default "$HOME/Music") for music player, etc. Of course, you could use flatpak override to override permissions, but it is a CLI tool and we are talking about Flatpak, which aims to become the future of apps on Linux and which relies on D-Bus session bus, so it is strictly designed for desktop usage, not servers.

[DrYak]

I still can't understand why so many fully opensource apps are so popular on snaps/flatpaks...

I mean:

If you really want to have the latest version of open source software, without the hassle of self-compiling, why not simply switch to a rolling-distro ? e.g.: openSUSE Tumbleweed is a very good one, with very rare breakage (a rolling distro doesn't mean a constant compiler-and-debug fest as Gentoo :-D )

If you don't necessarily want the latest version of everything but a few key apps, why not simply use a specific 3rd party repository (e.g.: Ubuntu's PPA and opensuse's Open Build System ?) not everything are small scale home project by enthousiats that just share a couple of self-compiled packages, some are large collection (see the Packman repository for everything multimedia for suse).