The State Of Flatpak vs. Snaps On Various Linux Distributions

[edoantonioco]

Ignoring all this political stuff and focusing on the technical approach to fix the issue, I still prefer the snaps packages. Im still not a fan of the runtime approach. At the end of the day, both will continue being used, and support on most of the distros will continue being improved, so its more choice for the developers than want to make a package for linux.

[mike44]

Just tried Krita that comes with appimage. Works great like on mac.

[duby229]

With rpm/apt, you approach the entire repo as one dependency graph. With e.g. flatpak, you confine your dependency tree to independent runtimes that can be updated asynchronously from the base OS rpm/apt dependency graphs.

What this means is that you might not need to update the user-facing flatpaks, but only the base OS rpm/apt dependency graphs and the flatpak runtime that links into the base OS (and you can update the flatpak runtime without affecting the base OS dependency graph).

This is a very big deal for ISVs, because it cuts down on their test and support surface, which will potentially lead to more ISVs offering their software for Linux. As an ISV, you could target the hypothetical XYS webdev stack v2.2x or later or the GNOME 3.2x stack or later for you app instead of having to distrubute eleventeen different .rpm/.deb/.ebuild/.tar.xz/.whatever versions for different distros and versions.

At least, that's my current understanding of the benefits of flatpaks.

I guess it depends on how good the sandbox is whther this is a good idea or not. If the sandbox is insecure it is actually a terrible idea. I highly suspect that flatpacks on desktop oriented distro's will be insecure and actually will help malware become a legitimate problem on linux for the first time ever.

EDIT: I guess the flip side to that is that flatpack based stores become possible, which would be awesome. In my opinion at least I think it could allow for greater distribution diversity, but in exactly the same way it could allow for more malware.

[jKicker]

Based on the summary quoted in the OP anyone who supports snap also supports flatkpack, so we really don't.

that was a joke and it doesn't work vice versa, ergo..