Red Hat Continues Driving Wonderful Innovations In Fedora Workstation

[Vistaus]

You are mistaken here. Snap does indeed support deltas: when upgrading a snap from one version to another, it just downloads a binary delta between the corresponding .snap archives. I'm not sure how it's implemented, I presume these deltas are generated dynamically by the server-side store software..

Probably only on Ubuntu, 'cause when I last tried Snap a few months ago on Solus, it would download the entire thing when updating instead of a delta.

Also, Rahul is right: Flatpak does use sandboxing and Snap has no support for file level deduplication.

[finalzone]

As third-party community packages with no upstream or distro support, generally in the "it works on my personal PC" category. I would know for having tried to use a number of them.

Next time do a proper research: https://flathub.org/home.

[zoomblab]

Next time do a proper research: https://flathub.org/home.

You didn't understand what jacob said. If you look at Skype for example you will see that the publisher is "Flathub maintainers". That is a major problem. It means that the bundle is not provided or supported by the upstream organization. It also means that fluthub is essentially a third party repository, from the point of view of the upstream organizations, very much like the distro repositories, though maybe more portable. Now, switching the point of view to distribution providers, you can imagine that they will not want to endorse a repository that is maintained by people who are closely associated with another distribution - especially RedHat :-)

Speaking for my personal point of view, as an independent linux user, the whole point of application bundles has always been the following equally important 2:

1. Be able to use a single file across different distributions and across different distribution releases.
2. Be able to use application bundles that are provided by the same organizations that produce the code instead of a third party (e.g., flathub maintainers). That means that I am sure that when I download Skype, it comes from Microsoft, Firefox from Mozilla, etc.

[RahulSundaram]

You didn't understand what jacob said. If you look at Skype for example you will see that the publisher is "Flathub maintainers". That is a major problem

What Jacob said is that applications like that fall under "it works on my personal PC" category. This is absolutely not the case.

1) Flatpak applications are not built on a personal PC
2) They have no host dependencies that would limit them to just working in one system but not the other by design
3) Regardless of where they are built or who is supporting or maintaining them, they are entirely distribution neutral and there are already several distributions supporting them.

I would also note that several projects including many upstream ones provide flatpak and they are not limited to GNOME or even KDE including even ones. There in even one called Winepak that makes it very convenient to run Windows applications for ex: https://github.com/winepak

[jacob]

Next time do a proper research: https://flathub.org/home.

Yes. That's exactly what I say: none of these flatpaks are released by the upstream developers.

[nanonyme]

Probably only on Ubuntu, 'cause when I last tried Snap a few months ago on Solus, it would download the entire thing when updating instead of a delta.

Also, Rahul is right: Flatpak does use sandboxing and Snap has no support for file level deduplication.

Note that for Flatpak the level of sandboxing varies vastly depending on application. Eg Steam application is nowhere near strict because that might have interfered with games/Steam. I'm planning a wiki page at some point in the Github repo for known ways to harden it that may cause side-effects for some users. I would also be reasonably interested to also see a PoC on running XWayland server inside a Flatpak container so you only have Wayland socket exposed between host and container

[nanonyme]

nice, however I'll believe when I'll see it working.

I share the feeling. I was just pointing out that this has been recognized as a real issue and is under work

[nanonyme]

What Jacob said is that applications like that fall under "it works on my personal PC" category. This is absolutely not the case.

1) Flatpak applications are not built on a personal PC
2) They have no host dependencies that would limit them to just working in one system but not the other by design
3) Regardless of where they are built or who is supporting or maintaining them, they are entirely distribution neutral and there are already several distributions supporting them.

I would also note that several projects including many upstream ones provide flatpak and they are not limited to GNOME or even KDE including even ones. There in even one called Winepak that makes it very convenient to run Windows applications for ex: https://github.com/winepak

The upside of the architecture though is that anyone can take the SDK used for building the app and build it locally if they really want to and get reproducible result. So basically "it works on my personal PC" is now the same thing as "it works on build server" and "it works for end user" excluding mostly GPU differences