The State Of Flatpak vs. Snaps On Various Linux Distributions

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The State Of Flatpak vs. Snaps On Various Linux Distributions

Motivated by KDE Plasma Leaning Towards Focusing On Flatpak Over AppImage/Snaps and this lengthy, contentious forum thread, a KDE contributor has taken a closer look at the Flatpak versus Snaps versions available in different Linux distributions...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Snaps-v-Flatpaks-Linux-Distros

[tildearrow]

Michael are you still fighting your network problems? (because of this typo)

He found that generally the latest Flapak version

[Karl Napf]

Last I checked snaps needed a (patched) AppArmor version to do confinement which was unavailable anywhere but on Ubuntu. Anywhere else snaps could be installed, but were entirely unconfined!

That kind of defeats the purpose, so I did not bother with snaps once I saw that.

[kyrios]

Also Solus did adopt Flatpak. I know it is a very young and small distro but I have the feeling that it might become a standard which is not the case of Snaps.

https://solus-project.com/2017/01/18/adopting-flatpak-to-reassemble-third-party-applications/

[cen1]

Does anybody really care about flatpak and snaps? To me it seems like yet another linux holy war that is reinventing the wheel and not contributing much to the ecosystem. Tell me ONE advatnage over rpm/apt.

[kyrios]

I do care.
It would be nice to have a cross-distro packaging system. Perhaps not to replace what already exists but to complete it (for example for 3rd party applications).

[cen1]

I do care.
It would be nice to have a cross-distro packaging system. Perhaps not to replace what already exists but to complete it (for example for 3rd party applications).

[bug77]

I have a very important contribution to make to the subject: du-uh!

[vincenthz]

Does anybody really care about flatpak and snaps? To me it seems like yet another linux holy war that is reinventing the wheel and not contributing much to the ecosystem. Tell me ONE advatnage over rpm/apt.

rpm/apt is about managing your core stuff, whereas flatpak comes with a guarantee runtime associated which is less hassle for developers to try to cover N different distributions runtime version of gnome (or KDE, or ..), is more secure with automatic declarative containerization (potentially offering the same kind of framework as iOS and android asking for permission to do thing), and the app is by design supposed to work on many distribution.

This also brings a common packaging for 3rd party binary app (chrome, skype, steam, unigine, games, etc..).

Also, even rpm or deb doesn't even guarantee to be working/installable on other distributions using the same packaging system (think redhat & suse, or ubuntu & debian)

[kyrios]

cen1 : I don't agree. I see flatpack like something more flexible that allow distributions directly from the publisher source with the advantage that the publishers have to package their apps only once for many distributions.
On Arch-based distros, it would probably be overkill since the AUR already allows that but RPM, DEB, EOPKG, ... don't have this flexibility!
Last but not least, it has some other little advantages like allowing to install multiple versions of a same application, etc...