I know snap is fairly unpopular in the Linux community, and I’ve seen mixed responses regarding Flatpak. I wanted to know, what’s the general opinion of people in this community regarding this 2 package managers?
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I use Flatpaks and they’re pretty great specifically for gui applications that don’t need any kind of deep integration with the system. For terminal applications or for applications that do need system integration, they’re not quite ready yet.
I’ve never tried snaps, but I hear almost exclusively bad things about them, so I’m not really interested in trying them either.
To quickly introduce myself, I’m the main author of Paperwork. I’ve packaged Paperwork in various ways, and many people have packaged it in various distributions as well.
I’m fine with Flatpak. In my opinion, it has its use cases. I find complementary to other existing methods (distribution packages, AppImage, …)
However I’m not fine with Snap. I haven’t used it much, but my understanding is that it focuses on Canonical servers. You can change its configuration to use other servers, but it defaults to Canonical servers (and we all know most users will never change default settings). To me, this is a slipping slope towards proprietary services/software.
Moreover, I’m really annoyed by Canonical pushing Snap by default in Ubuntu (Firefox, Chrome, etc are packaged only using Snap now; the APT packages install the Snap packages). It doesn’t bring anything to the users. Those packages could have been as well-packaged using APT (see the repositories *-updates in Debian for instance).
PS: nice software your Paperwork. I hope in the future you’ll add support for djvu format – most of my documents are in that format (it saves a lot of memory for scanned documents, compared to pdf).
That’s something I would like to do someday. Unfortunately, last time I checked, libraries for reading DjVu files exist and are OK, but not for writing them. Last time I checked, most programs I found that write DjVu files actually don’t use the DjVuLibre library. They actually run the DjVuLibre commands.
If an app shouldn’t affect the rest of my system i don’t mind it as a flatpak. I like that I can use the bleeding edge of an app without system breaking dependencies. I also appreciate the sandbox that flatpaks seem to be contained in. If something is meant to be a part of my system then it needs to be native.
My experience with snaps have not been pleasant, patricularly on arm devices.
Seriously, I really wonder if the opinion about Snap/Flatpak is really that strong outside of the echo chambers of the Linux online communities.
Concerning Snap, I saw people upgrade from Ubuntu 18.04 to 22.04 w/o even noticing it. (AFAIK that was after Canonical invested some time in the performance problems.) Of course, I can also understand Ubuntu users which where unhappy about performance degradations with Snap packages.
I run openSUSE MicroOS/Aeon on my entertainment system with Flatpaks, and for my use case, flatpaks / immutable Linux distributions are brilliant: Automatic updates on reboot and I didn’t have to bother with anything after the first time setup.
On my work desktops I run Debian and I am quite happy for some applications packaged as Flatpak, which would be hard to get in updated versions otherwise. At the same time, development environments in Flatpak are - at this moment - more trouble to me than it is worth it (integrating with toolchains/build systems and the operating system).
In general, my opinion is that Snaps/Flatpak provide a great solution distributing software in the Linux ecosystem and I would prefer, if distributions focus more on their core operating system instead of the redundant work of packaging the same software again and again and again. Of course, Snaps/Flatpaks will always have some drawbacks compared to a package integrated into your system (a little bit more disk space and perhaps a little bit more memory). OTOH a lot of problems we see now will hopefully be solved in the short/long run (theme integration, sandboxing, integration in the rest of the system).
The best thing that could possibly happen is, that the maintainers of several distributions which do redundant work team up on the flatpak packages and make them really awesome.
Looking really forward how things will develop in the next few years, and I especially look forward how openSUSE Aeon will develop. Linux is getting interesting again. ;-)
I reject Flatpak and Snap, but do use a couple Appimages (Electrum and Trezor Suite). I was playing with Snap and Flatpak, and noticed right away how terrible Flatpak was when I downloaded Cointop, small simple CLI application and it was an enormous download. There are also a lot of security issues though they’ve probably mitigated some of them. Also remember that Red Hat is the one pushing Flatpak which has some value for enterprise customers, but they could also tailor a package to a particular distribution. Snap is pretty much dead except for Ubuntu’s immutable OS which will probably go nowhere as they’ve lost to Red Hat. But this write up is a great overview from 2021:
https://ludocode.com/blog/flatpak-is-not-the-future
A major goal of most of these technologies is to support an “app store” experience: Docker Hub, Flathub, the Steam Store, Snapcraft, and AppImageHub (but not AppImageHub?) These technologies are all designed around this model because the owners want a cut of sales revenue or fees for enterprise distribution. (Flathub only says they don’t process payments at present. It’s coming.)
That write-up is pretty bad actually, it misunderstands a lot of things about Flatpak and why it does things the way it does and just contains a lot of misinfo, to the point where I’d call it FUD more than anything
This response points out the issues with it: https://theevilskeleton.gitlab.io/2022/05/16/response-to-flatpak-is-not-the-future.html
As an out-of-band software delivery method and supply chain that
- breaks single source of truth
- defeats/breaks simple enterprise-style (HOST-RESOURCES-MIB::hrSWInstalledName) inventory
- enforces/uses alternate dependencies
It has ab-sol-ute-ly no value to me, and only security risk after security risk.
Apologies to those who’ve spent time on them, but I’m happy to not see them as their value within the scope of my workday fell off a cliff in about 1996 - maybe before they even existed - with the advent of something better.
Again, sorry. I’m only speaking as someone who used to manage OS security on Unix and has spent 20 years in the leviathan-enterprise space as rehab. Your mileage with glitter may vary.
I’m on Kinoite so I love flatpaks obviously. I will never integrate another application into my system again after going immutable. For everything else I setup a toolbox.
I’ve been known to write half-assed native packages for the odd piece of software, and just plain give up on some others, rather than touch Snap or Flatpak. I simply don’t like the concept. (As with many other things, I won’t stop anyone else from using it, though.)
Thanks to Flatpak, I can have basically careless OS updates with Fedora Silverblue, so I’m very happy with them. I also appreciate the fact that every distro that can run Flatpak automatically has a wide range of software available to it.
I’m sure Snaps have similar advantages, but I haven’t worked with them much. I don’t really like that you can only publish Snaps through Canonical though, so in that sense I hope Flatpak wins.
I’ve come around to liking Flatpak.
- I don’t have to deal with dependency hell I sometimes get with third party packages (AUR/PPA)
- I don’t have to worry about make dependencies
- I don’t have to deal with clutter in my home directory, they are mostly encapsulated in ~/.var and easy to clean, discover even asks me. Especially if I try the app for 10 minutes and device it wasn’t for me. Espexially for apps that don’t follow XDG base directory specifications (which is too many, but that’s another post)
- I get some (imperfect) sandboxing and control over what an app can access, especially with proprietary things like Discord …
Anything I need to get into a desktop environment should come from the distribution’s repositories and package manager. For user applications, Flatpak is great.
First of all, I think an idea of package management separated from a system environment is generally good for desktop usage. And don’t like and the idea to place all existing application software in distro repositories. But implementations are far from ideal. So I list those bellow from worse to better.
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AppImage. It highly relies on the environment doesn’t have native sandboxing, and promotes bad practices like building apps with old libraries.
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Snap. Snap is mostly fine but relies only on AppArmor for confinement, has performance issues for a long time without significant progress. It promotes a proprietary app store. Relies on Ubuntu infrastructure. Good: snap store support signed packages and more friendly to developers.
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Flatpak. App start time is near to native. It has stronger sanboxing but with many holes for compatibility. It true distro-independent as well as popular runtimes are also distro-independent. Bad: Flathub doesn’t support signed applications. Sandboxing and permissions rely on hacks and tricks which are far from good design. Development is slow but it is true for the mentioned above as well.
With that, I am more open to new alternatives, especially if started from a system point of view rather than from a position of distro-independent package managers like Google did with Android. For example, sandboxing can rely on users separation and work on various operating systems not only with Linux kernel.
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Flatpak made my life much easier. It solves so many problems that the Linux ecosystem had. “Package once, use everywhere” is great.
Snap could have been similarly good, but I think Canonical made some mistakes.
I don’t hate Snap. I think a bit of friendly competition is good for both Snap and Flatpak.
I’m fine with Flatpak (and also AppImages if a Flatpak isn’t available). As for Snaps, I don’t like some of Canonical’s decisions like apt installing the Firefox Snap instead of a deb package, and I think the user experience when using Flatpaks is better overall.
This doesn’t mean Flatpaks are perfect for me yet, they just work better than their alternatives.
Flatpak’s the only one I’ve had good experiences with. Tangentially related, but I especially dislike AppImages. I’m not a fan of how bulky installing various flatpaks ends up being and use native packages or the AUR usually, but beyond that they’re really convenient for non-critical applications that otherwise would mesh poorly with my distro or aren’t available there. Friend of mine tells me it’s also a nice system to package Windows applications/games with a preconfigured Wine version.
Flatpak is fantastic. I think containerization is definitely the future of Linux app distribution, because the security and portability are so much better than native packages. Flatpak is the best implementation of this concept IMO, because it has a robust permission management system, is completely open unlike snap, and is performant with fast load times, solid deduplication of dependencies, and no garbage loopback devices
