what are snaps? - me a linux mint user
I use appimage. flatpak and snap can’t be used portably.
Nor securely
All three are ridiculous. In what world should every application take two gigabytes of disk?
In a world where two gigabytes are cheap and software and dependencies complicated
My preference for flatpaks is based upon I can further lock out network access for those apps that I don’t want having network access. Just gives me another layer of network access prevention using flatseal. For the paranoid side of me :)
Have a couple apps can only use appimages, using with gear lever is just great & easy
Both work great though
AppImages are completely different thing versus Flatpak and Snap.
Sure. Streaming and DVDs are also completely different things but both deliver media to your TV. The consumer chooses what the consumer wants.
The comparison does not hold up, because for watching films it does not matter on what medium it is. But for applications it has huge implications for maintaining versions, updates, creating packages with or without runtimes and dependencies and a repository and so on, that work differently on operating systems and so on. This goes way beyond just the user choosing the format.
I use Appimage and flatpack, but not snaps.
I’m not sure why you reply this to me directly.
I use Docker and apt instead. The definition of an application lives in a single text file and you don’t give it anymore resources or permissions than it needs.
So much so, that I wrote a bunch of scripts to make life easier, without ever needing to go anywhere near appimage, flatpak or snap.
cool but isn’t the whole point of flatpaks to provide an alternative for when the “apt” version doesn’t exist?
I use apt, but you don’t have to, instead you can use any package manager from any distribution and use that distribution within the container.
If an application isn’t packaged, you can use the same mechanism to compile from source.
IMHO, if it’s not packaged and you can’t compile from source, it’s time to look for a different application.
app images need to not be called app images. first time seeing it it sounds like some macos thing. but even still I don’t see why they get compared so much to flatpak and snap when they are completely different.
They serve the same purpose: Install software, that’s not in your distro‘s repository.
Doesn’t Ubuntu still ship with Snap? I don’t think Flatpak trumps that yet. It’s hard to say one of the other formats won when Canonical (or Fedora derivatives in the case of Flatpak) still mainline something else.
Canonical made Snap, so would be weird if they didn’t ship with it in Ubuntu.
No. Apt won.
Is this @pizzalovingnerd ? He looks just like him
I used to hate AppImages until I had Snap forced on me. Then i thought AppImages weren’t so bad and I fled Snap by running straight into the arms of Flatpak
I like both flatpaks and appimages why does everything have to be a victory and defeat
why does everything have to be a victory and defeat
there can only be one standard.
But what if it doesn’t cover my specific usecase?
Compile from source
Damn, I was hoping to lead you into the relevant xkcd :p
I thought of it too :)
Because it’s nice for devs to have a single package type to build per OS
Yeah, it’s called .deb
Well that’s not gonna work on rpm based distributions now is it
How is that my problem
How is that my problem
Well let’s break it down…
You thought:
Yeah, it’s called .deb
Was an acceptable response to:
Because it’s nice for devs to have a single package type to build per OS
Your problem was your stupidity.
But now your problem is everyone knowing about it.
Jesus fucking Christ, it’s like you had your sense of humor surgically removed.
Ah yes, the ol’ people are annoyed at the actions I chose to take, so I’ll call it a joke defence
I think you’re the one lacking a sense of humor if you thought your comment was funny instead of making you look like an ass.
Neither Flatpaks nor AppImages can provide those.
It’s not that big of a deal to package in both flatpak and appimage.
Why can’t they do that already? Just choose whichever one you want it’s trivial for me to run whichever as a user
Recently I wanted to uninstall $thing. Couldn’t via the package manager. I had forgotten that it wasn’t a native package. So what was it? *scratches head* Flatpak, snap or Appimage? Aw damn, it’s an AppImage. Now where did I put the binary? *scratches head*.
Maybe you would like appimagelauncher. It allows you to define a directory for storing your appimages and you just put them in there and you can automatically launch it from the system menu as if they were installed apps. It also makes removing them easier, since they’re all in the same directory and you just remove them and the shortcuts get deleted as well
I present to you: https://flathub.org/en-GB/apps/it.mijorus.gearlever
I think it’s really funny that it’s a flatpak used to manage AppImages
I know right?! ;)
Uhh…should probably get yourself in order because that sounds like a you problem to be completely honest
The fluxer appimage will ‘install’ itself into /opt/ without your knowledge. I think because it’s essentially an electron package similar to stoat, standard notes and discord, large parts of it can self-update without needing to bump the actual package version, but this is really shitty behaviour considering what appimages are designed to do.
If you can run it, it shouldn’t be more than a couple of clicks to find it.
In ~/Downloads/
Just not snaps.
AppImage and flatpak are fine though
Whats wrong with snaps? My only “issue” with appimages is i tend to leave them in my downloads folder and lose them
snaps are essentially ubuntu-only
I have an ~/app directory for appimages
Ty for both
There’s an appimaged daemon you can install that will manage them, and it watches a bunch of folders to integrate appimages with xdg and whatever window manager you’ve got.
~/Applicationslooks like an easy pick, or~/.local/bin.Appimages you decide to keep you can just move there!
The snap store is a shit show of security issues.
Forced migration to snaps.
Performance issues.
Proprietary back end.
Slow to install
Slow to start
Eat up RAM
Eat up disk space
They screw up access to devices.
They automatically update themselves without user confirmation.
Fuck snaps. Fuck Canonical.
My issues with snaps are:
- The server software is closed source and centralized
- They create many block devices that can slow down booting the PC.
I didn’t realize, damn.
Correct
Come on, you know if a dev doesn’t offer an appimage, someone is going to shit on them for it.
It goes a long way to simplicity from both a user and dev to have only one package type to deal with and distribute.
I’d agree with that sentiment, but at least for me, if we went with all flatpacks, i’d be losing the one ability that I like about appimages, which is as a one-time-use type of “installation”. They’re kind of like those windows EXEs that you could just run in place without needing to install. very useful for stuff like raspberrypi imager where I don’t need to keep it around much
appimages also allow some sort of portable apps you can carry around. Very useful for dealing with no internet scenarios. I also use appimages for things iI use very rarely and don’t want to bother to have them being updated regularly along with the system
This completely. Speaking as a person who’s more tech skilled than 99% of non-programmers, i can tell you that installing apps is the main tech hurdle for Linux getting mainstream adoption.
There are non-tech hurdles too, but of the actual technology being easy to use then app installation is really the only aspect left that regular people can’t do without a huge dive of tech learning that’s beyond what most people can do.
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Installing on mac: click the Mac download button and follow the prompts.
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Installing on Windows: click the Windows download button and follow the prompts.
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Installing on Linux: there’s no Linux download button, there’s a couple of buttons that say words you’ve never heard of before. They look kinda like buttons to download an app. You click one and try to open it, but it just shows an error, etc etc etc
As a longtime Mac user, that’s not quite as easy. Some apps are only available through the Mac App Store. For applications you download there are several variants:
- installers: double click and go through an install wizard with next buttons
- zip files: double click to unpack, then put the app wherever you want (typically /Applications or ~/Applications)
- disk images: double click to mount. Then drag and drop the app to /Applications
- through macports or homebrew via command line
- there are a couple of Apple system tools, that are often installed via command line like Rosetta and Xcode command line tools
Of course you can have a zip file, that contains a disk image, that then contains an installer.
For applications downloaded from the internet, you also get at least a warning when opening it. If it’s not notarized, you have to go to system settings to be able to run it. For many applications, you also need to go to settings and fiddle with sandbox settings to make them work.
New users are often challenged by all these options. There are many who end up running an app from a disk image for example.
You might also need to select the correct architecture because some applications don’t provide universal binaries for some reason.
While installation is an issue for Linux, the bigger issue is the low availability of quality commercial software. The immense fracturing between distributions creates tons of issues as well.
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I fucking love appimages. I dont have any issues with Flatpak. I just like appimages more and i can get them for almost all of my stuff. So idk if flatpaks won. But i also dont care.
yeah my use case is lift and shift so appimage is what I use.
AppImages are great! It reminds me a lot of how software is packaged on MacOS and I think it hits that perfect trifecta of powerful, simple, and easy to use
AppImages integrate better, but despite including roughly the same amount of overhead bullshit as a flatpak, have been less reliable for me overall. Flatpaks are too isolated, even when they’re supposedly installed properly.
What the fuck happened to distro packages? .rpm, .deb?
I love flatpaks and your attitude
As much as I enjoy ease of use via package management, I prefer AppImage.
Although I have more flatpaks, the apps I do have under appimage tend to crash less often compared to flatpaks.
If an app is available as a native package, 10 times out of 10 will go for the native package
I however, would prefer a system without flatpak & snap. :tux:
My only issue with flatpaks is that sometimes when I want to quickly install something using gnome software, it takes ages and downloads several GBs of data, despite the app having a much smaller size. This is really weird and makes me avoid using it, but I don’t know if it’s something with flatpak or gnome software
This is because flatpak apps depend on flatpak runtimes, so the app will download the entire runtime it needs when you dont have it installed already.
This is bad because a lot of flatpak runtimes like the GNOME runtime only have one year of support, so you blow a lot of storage in practice
I believe it’s a consequence of how flatpaks are sandboxed. The software itself might be small, but that sandbox also has to contain every dependency that software requires. It can get distressing when you’re on a 500GB ssd.
