[arboghast]

A bit of a tangent, but I'm not a big fan of Snaps (or Flatpaks for that matter). Whenever I tried to use them, I ran into issues as soon as I need to do some changes in the configuration.

Take Firefox on the latest Ubuntu for example, it installs as a Snap. Unlike the APT package (or any other package manager) version, the usual ~/.mozilla/ directory changed location. This broke some of my customization scripts and other people's scripts I'm using such as https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix

I would really, really, like if both Flatpaks and Snaps could keep the usual program's config directories. Then I would likely use them often because they have big advantages (especially Flatpaks) over package managers, especially for dependencies.

[jle17]

I kinda like that flatpak forces application created files to end up in a predictable place. Firefox, like plenty of applications, was doing its own thing despite XDG conventions (~/.config etc and associated env vars) being 20 or so years old, now everything is in ~/.var/app, plus flatpak knows if it belongs to an installed application or not.

Although I would have preferred if the hierarchy was reversed, so instead of having ~/.var/app/<app>/{cache,config,data} for each application, I could have all files of a category in the same place as to be able to manage them more easilly (say remove all the cache, version all the config), like it is now for the applications that respect XDG dirs.

[nieve]

Except isn't ~/.var/app is just another "doing its own thing" directory?

[jle17]

Yeah kinda, but at least it's not every applications doing their own thing, it's the thing that runs applications, so assuming you only run sandboxed flatpak stuff, you end up with only one thing.