I think I’ve landed on Flatpak as my favourite between Snap, Flatpak, and AppImage. AppImage, when it works, is nice though. Snaps are just kind of inconvenient (auto-updates are a no for me) and bloated and the things Canonical are doing as an organization put a bad taste in my mouth.
I’ve had bad experiences with AppImages. For universal format they do a really poor job at that. And it’s a huge step back into Windows direction that you’ll have to manually download, update etc your shit. Makes managing a bunch of apps a pain.
Unpopular opinion: snap is not so bad and genuinely useful for many things
I would rather have a snap than building from source or use some tar.gz archive with a sketchy install script
some tar.gz archive with a sketchy install script
I just can’t… like maybe I’m too old and that’s why I still can’t wrap my head around how we went from “./configure && make & make install scripts are almost the de facto way to install software in linux” to “a sketchy install script”. We’re living interesting times at Linux
Blame the thousands of supply chain attacks.
Last time I ran a corporate-made installer, it caused massive graphical glitches and lock-ups after waking from sleep. It basically gave my system computer-AIDS.
That’s why I never run scripts which are too long for me to easily understand outside a sandbox. Official distro repositories and Flatpaks are the only sources I have some level of trust in.
I would prefer manually writing each software using butterflies over having
snapdinstalled on my system.obligatory “there is always a relevant xkcd”
I’d rather be able to use my web browser uninterrupted without it being updated while using it and be forced to restart it.
The updates download in the background and will install when you exit the snapped app. If you really don’t want automatic updates, you can run
snap refresh --holdto hold all automatic updates or add a snap name to hold updates for that snap.
Very unpopular
And what do they offer over flatpak?
Better cli experience and the permission prompts are two that come to mind.
A built-in way to have services running (which is why openprinting can make a snap of CUPS but AFAICT can’t make a Flatpak).
