Screenshot doesn’t even show half.
This is an interesting way to show your fstab
There are many reasons one could choose to hate Snap packages, and this not one of them. It’s like hating a webbrowser because it spawns 20 processes that (the horror) you would all see when you run ps. It’s just a part of how container technologies work.
Try it in enterprise where you have automated systems that deploy alert sensors and they instantly go off because each mount is 100% full.
I think Snap has the potential to be better than Flatpak. It’s a real sandbox instead of the half-assed shit Flatpak has going on. The problem I have with Snap is that Canonical keeps the Server closed-source. I don’t want a centralized app store where Canonical can just choose to remove apps they don’t like. So as long as the Server is closed-source, I will stay on Flatpak
Kind of? Maybe?
It has similar goals to something like docker, but goes about it very differently, and it’s obviously meant for user-facing applications.
You wouldn’t use docker to install steam, but you can use flatpak.
I asked the question because of the label “half-assed” that the commenter above me put on Flatpak. I do not know much about snap, Flatpak and how they differ (other than the fact that both are used as containerisation technologies for desktop apps and the former is by Canonical), and why Flatpak is necessarily worse that snap (by what metric? System performance? Storage?)
@MigratingtoLemmy @I_like_cats I wondered about that, but to me it just feels like an isolated file system based app structure, kinda like the .app folders in Macs. Does that sound right?
And with permissions, you can stop the app from accessing anything outside of its specific little file system.
I don’t know if sideloading snap apps is a thing, but it has been proven that creating a snap repo isn’t particularly difficult. Snap server being closed isn’t really an issue Imho.
Why I hate snaps/flatpak:
- 1
- package/appimage ~80mb
- snap/flatpak >500mb
- 2
- p/a - app + dependencies
- s/f - app + minimal linux distribution
- 3
- p/a - can be easily run from terminal
- s/f - flatpak run com.very.easy.to.remember.and.type.name
snap/flatpak >500mb
Don’t know about Snap, but Flatpak download sizes decrease significantly after installing the main platform libraries, they can become really small; of course that’s pretty much fully negated if you’re installing Electron apps, but even then 500MB isn’t very accurate, more like 150MB on average
flatpak run com.very.easy.to.remember.and.type.name
Yes I hate it, what is even more annoying is that you can do flatpak install someapp and it will search matches on its own, it shows them to you to let you decide, but after that you can’t do flatpak run someapp because it “doesn’t exist”
Hopefully it would be fixed upstream on the actual flatpak command, but do you know if there are wrappers for it already?
Then you do a flatpak list and it abbreviates the shit out of the identifiers so you can’t use them either. Whoever designed that UX needs to lean back an contemplate life a bit.
Well that comes down to your terminal size, you have to filter the columns if your screen is too small: docs
flatpak --columns="app" list
Snaps have a similar deduplication mechanism, and snaps allows calling apps from their names like you would do with regular packages.
I think the reason for the second one is that while snaps are also meant to be used in servers/cli flatpak is built only with desktop GUI apps in mind.
Yes, sizes might be inaccurate - it’s been about a year last time I tried snap or flatpak. All I remember is that snap installs around 300 mb gtk3 runtime and it’s often 2 or more of them, because different snaps might rely on different gtk versions + other dependencies.
And I remember that when snap and flatpak compared, allegedly flatpak requires more storage space.
I am aware that runtime sizes doesn’t scale with number of packages past maybe 3-4, but I have only 4 appimages on my system right now and they take ~200 mb, it is absurd that I’d need 10 times more space allocated for the same (or worse) functionality.
Appimage literally requires more storage for the apps because it dublicates all dependencies so in terms of storage flatpak and dnaps win by FAR, there are valid reasons to criticize all three but your comment is a sad joke!
It does make sense why it works the way it works but I still don’t want it on my system
Unless you trying to replace half your system with appimages, appimages take less space in practice .
Did you read my comment at all? Flatpak and Snap share dependencies while Appimage doublicates all of them so unless you have no big dependencies on your system (literally impossible with Linux systems) Flatpaks and Snaps become more efficient in terms of storage usage the more you use them because they share big parts while Appimage still dublicates every single dependency because it’s a single binarie with everything in it…
snap/flatpak >500mb
And to make it worse, snap keeps copies of previous versions of all programs. Which can be good if you need to roll something back, but at least last time I used Ubuntu it didn’t provide any easy way to configure retention or clean up old snaps.
Runtimes are okay, the problem is there is no runtime package manager and often you have like 7 of them, which is horrible. But on modern hard drives also no problem.
Appimages cant be easily ran from terminal, you need to link then to your Path.
For Flatpak I made a tool that aliases their launch commands to be very easy.
Your point 1 and 2 are the same
a - app + dependencies
Which will be duplicated for everything installed application, and redownloaded for every new version. Whereas flatpak and snappy shares the dependencies between applications.
s/f - flatpak run com.very.easy.to.remember.and.type.name
Snappy makes easily run command line shortcuts. Flatpak could use some improvements there though.
