[esseph]

> Flatpak and Snap are new to me and that's the annoyance.

These were designed to solve different problems.

PS - Just avoid snap. Fuck snap. All my homies hate snap.

Flatpak otoh is software basically delivered in a container with some security restrictions. It works great, but you may want a GUI problem called "flatseal" to enable access to certain parts of the host filesystem, device access, etc depending on specifics of what the particular application is supposed to do. That's a bit of a security boundary (good).

Flatpak does solve several big issues with the minor and only occasional need to use flatseal to enable access to say something in /proc /dev etc

Snap happened in 2014

Flatpak in 2015

So you've got about 10 years of catch-up ;)

[morshu9001]

I'm not really obligated to catch up on that. I'll try Linux again if they ever sort these things out, until then Mac is a fine dev/personal machine.

[plagiarist]

Are you sure that's okay? It has App Store, .pkg, drag-to-install, homebrew, MacPorts, and who knows what else!

[morshu9001]

MacPorts vs Homebrew is actually my biggest gripe with Mac dev, but at least it doesn't get in the way of installing basic software. Regular stuff is always intuitive and ends up with a .app. Even lots of dev stuff is just a .pkg you download, macports/homebrew is for niches.

[esseph]

> I'll try Linux again if they ever sort these things out

You don't understand. This won't be "sorted out", this is a feature.

Maybe it's just not for you, and that's ok.

[morshu9001]

You said it yourself, "fuck snap." But Snap is the default for a bunch of things. There's probably someone else saying "fuck flatpak." The user doesn't win this way, it's not a feature.

[eikenberry]

Snaps are a Canonical thing and is only used by default on Ubuntu and distro's based on Ubuntu. No other distro uses or recommends them.

[morshu9001]

Those are the popular distros though. Switch to something else and you trade 1 problem for 10.

[eikenberry]

If you want to base it on popularity then you should use Debian. Debian and its child distros (of which Ubuntu is one) make up the majority of Linux distros and the child distros are still 99% Debian.

[esseph]

Flatpak is available on every distro.

[esseph]

Ehhhh

Professionally I've only ran into a handful of Ubuntu installs.

Dozens of SUSE

Hundreds of thousands of RHEL.

So if I wanted to help someone new, I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu because it would be somewhat of a dead end.

Fedora gives you familiarity with the largest deployed commercial Linux, while still getting the newest packages out there through either fedora yum or flatpak. Best of both worlds.

[esseph]

Snap is Ubuntu and derivatives only which is a respectable but smaller segment of the options.

It's also a fucking system daemon that runs in the background. Avoid.

Flatpak is available on every distro.

[morshu9001]

Look I have no love for snap in particular, but it exists as a default in serious places. If you can bury it then great, the less confusion the better. I'm not going to install some alt distro just to avoid it though.

Send Xorg to a nice farm too. Or Wayland. Whichever the bad one is. Competing window servers is a way bigger problem.