[rsolva]

Having observed (well deserved) criticism of both Snap and Flatpak during the years, Flatpak seems to emerge as the most sensible solution, continuously addressing and improving on the pain points and security challenges.

I have been using Fedora 34/35 the last year or so, and Flatpaks are well integrated and mostly just works without any performance hit. Being able to adjust permissions per app (with Flatseal) has also been a great experience.

I have little experience with Snap, but the few times I have had to deal with it on Ubuntu-based distros, it has left a bad impression from a user perspective.

[gjsman-1000]

It’s not even remotely close. Snaps take longer to load, still sometimes have theme issues, you have to manually install Snap on almost all non-Snap distributions, you’ll be littered with garbage mountpoints, you’ll have a useless snap folder in your home directory, you can’t add external repositories of any kind, and you get no ability to stop updates easy without going into duct tape solutions.

Snap wants to be a desktop, and server, system. Not with a 10 foot pole - Docker is literally 100x better. Not on my Desktop - Flatpak is superior there.

[zamalek]

> Snaps take longer to load

Without fail, on multiple machines, shutdown/restart is stalled for the maximum 2:30 timeout for snapd. It's a useful reminder to uninstall Snap whenever I find myself in the unfortunate situation of using Ubuntu.

[azalemeth]

Don't forget odd permissions problems. From memory, ipfs is distributed as a snap. Try saving a file to another location outside of the snap jail. Almost impossible.

[throwaway984393]

As an Alpine user, Flatpak is invaluable. Snap isn't supported because it requires systemd.

[rsolva]

Had not thought about that! I want to set up my old Lenovo X220 with a minimal distro and was thinking of using Alpine + Sway. Using Flatpak for all the "regular" apps more than makes up for the apps not present in Alpines repos.

[kkfx]

Solution to what? Personally I think ALL of such package managers exists only for a reason: satisfy commercial software needs, in disguise to being developed for free by a community instead of being neglected and pushed to the place they deserve, witch is /dev/null.

The future of package management is NixOS/Guix System, the future of isolation are cgroups (see FireJail, BubbleWrap). The rest is absurd like full-stack virtualization on x86 to make VMWare profit, HW OEMs profit, consulting profits etc and people who should not, because of ignorance, running infra built by someone else a brick at a time, or the way to create disaster waiting to happen...

I see exactly ZERO good cases for snap, flatpak, appimage etc... ZERO, really.

[gaius_baltar]

Perhaps there's still a way to save snaps. Does somebody knows of a snapd fork that allows control over updates and alternate snap stores?