I know snap is fairly unpopular in the Linux community, and I’ve seen mixed responses regarding Flatpak. I wanted to know, what’s the general opinion of people in this community regarding this 2 package managers?
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Snaps still don’t seem to have network storage permissions when I tried ubuntu a week ago, so they suck for me. I put just about everything on my NFS.
A lot of the flatpaks for programs I actually use are third party and not maintained by the actual developer, have missing or enweirdened features because of the sandboxing, and are a removed to run from command line. So I try to avoid those too.
pretty unpopular opinion i believe, but i loathe them. they feel like installing apps from the windows store, but worse. i use them on steam deck and my laptop, but they often fail to launch with no feedback[1], won’t accept drag&dropped files, store their dotfiles in weird places, take up much more disc space (and therefore take literally almost 10x as long to download), won’t inherit the theme (i think because plasma stores the gtk theme in a non-standard place), etc. they feel like they’ve been designed to flout what os developers have built up over many decades and are just a struggle to use.
on steam deck particularly (so i know it’s not a configuration i’ve screwed up) no flatpaks will launch unless i launch them twice. even after that, there’s a long delay (~1 minute) and then two instances launch. i know this sounds like i should just wait until the first one launches, but that doesn’t work ↩︎
The Flatpak theming issue is really annoying, yeah. There’s a rather limited pool of GTK themes to choose from in Flathub, but as long as you’re running one of those themes in your DE (assuming GNOME or other GTK-based), themes will inherit. Can’t speak to KDE as I haven’t used Plasma as primary.
Other than that, Flatpak has been great. I use it reasonably heavily on a laptop that’s slower than a Steam Deck (Ryzen 5 3500u, 8GB DDR4, 1TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus) and haven’t run into performance issues on multiple distros — EndeavourOS, Pop!_OS, LMDE, Fedora, an early version of Vanilla OS, and most recently Debian 12. On my desktop I don’t feel a performance difference between Flatpak and native.
The steam deck uses KDE, so the most popular Linux desktop device is going to be showcasing what flatpak is(n’t) capable of.
This is largely a problem thanks to the GNOME developers though, refusing to play nicely with anyone else and acting like their way is THE way.
I always prefer native packages over containerized. But I’m glad they exist, because every now and then a native package won’t work. I don’t agree with most people that say Linux needs to be streamlined: less distros, less packaging systems, etc. Personally, I like when I have options. I prefer flatpak over snaps and appimages, but ideally I’d like to have all of them available just in case. When comparing snaps to flatpaks, in my personal experience, flatpaks just integrate better. But they’re not THAT much better than snaps, so I could see myself using either, it’s just that so far I haven’t run into a situation where I’d need to use a snap. There is one downside to flatpaks though, and it’s their names. As DT pointed out in his video, it can be pretty annoying to run them through terminal. But I hate the fact that Mint removed snap and Ubuntu removed flatpaks. I don’t think we’re achieving anything with this “war of formats”. Let people use both and decide for themselves.
Flatpak is fantastic. I think containerization is definitely the future of Linux app distribution, because the security and portability are so much better than native packages. Flatpak is the best implementation of this concept IMO, because it has a robust permission management system, is completely open unlike snap, and is performant with fast load times, solid deduplication of dependencies, and no garbage loopback devices
Flatpak made my life much easier. It solves so many problems that the Linux ecosystem had. “Package once, use everywhere” is great.
Snap could have been similarly good, but I think Canonical made some mistakes.
I don’t hate Snap. I think a bit of friendly competition is good for both Snap and Flatpak.
My first experience with snap was rather frustrating.
The application kept failing to read the config file I provided without telling me why. After reading up it turns out snap can only read from the users home directory (and mounts, I think).
Fine, frustrating but I vaguely understand it. So I move my config to the home directory. Still the same issue with no explanation.
Finally it turns out it can’t read dot files or dot directories even inside the home directory.
Again, that’s understandable but it was an incredibly frustrating, unintuitive experience. Vastly different than the Linux experience I was accustomed to.
I like Flatpak in general and it might be the future™ but I hate how huge the packages are
It’s bloated… but at least now even my grandmother can use linux thanks to it. :^)
Don’t really like Snap since it uses my system ram whenever I boot up my os.
As for Flatpak, its been a great experience for me so far.
I’ve come around to liking Flatpak.
- I don’t have to deal with dependency hell I sometimes get with third party packages (AUR/PPA)
- I don’t have to worry about make dependencies
- I don’t have to deal with clutter in my home directory, they are mostly encapsulated in ~/.var and easy to clean, discover even asks me. Especially if I try the app for 10 minutes and device it wasn’t for me. Espexially for apps that don’t follow XDG base directory specifications (which is too many, but that’s another post)
- I get some (imperfect) sandboxing and control over what an app can access, especially with proprietary things like Discord …
Anything I need to get into a desktop environment should come from the distribution’s repositories and package manager. For user applications, Flatpak is great.
I’m trying to use native package as much as possible, then tar.gz package, .appimage, compiling from source on that order. I only use flatpak as last resort.
I tend to use native packages. However, I find Flatpak very useful to avoid large list of dependencies, specially when Wine is involved.
my mirst contact with snap was while trying to instal lubuntu to some old laptop, and was confused why Firefox too minutes to start.
If you want me to use something - better make it better than original thing. This was terrible experience, I needed some time to disable it and find a way to installed real package.
And don’t hide it from me. And let me choose.
So I don’t like it, I don’t care about technical advantages, if there are any, I will not use it because someone forced it upon me. o can not support such behavior.
Flatpaks are too big. And most packages I wanted have serious bugs. And I never found how to change font size in those apps.
AppImage is great, I use it for gimp, inkscape, libreoffice and some other software packages I rarely use. but they don’t have official repository, so I will not take binaries from some random people on the net. nor use google as my package manager.
As an out-of-band software delivery method and supply chain that
- breaks single source of truth
- defeats/breaks simple enterprise-style (HOST-RESOURCES-MIB::hrSWInstalledName) inventory
- enforces/uses alternate dependencies
It has ab-sol-ute-ly no value to me, and only security risk after security risk.
Apologies to those who’ve spent time on them, but I’m happy to not see them as their value within the scope of my workday fell off a cliff in about 1996 - maybe before they even existed - with the advent of something better.
Again, sorry. I’m only speaking as someone who used to manage OS security on Unix and has spent 20 years in the leviathan-enterprise space as rehab. Your mileage with glitter may vary.
