Personally I like the idea of universal sandbox apps. Flatpak and snaps all the way for me.
If you can choose. I wasn’t able to get chromium installed without hunting for a .deb and I needed USB access which snap didn’t give me
The biggest issue to me with snap (unless something has changed since the last time I looked it up) is that it’s all a walled garden by canonical and it’s not open source (in the sense of package submission, review, rating, source availability, etc).
With flatpak/flathub you can see the source and discussion behind each package
https://github.com/orgs/flathub/repositories
But that transparency doesn’t exist on snap so you are just hoping canonical did their homework on vetting apps
Hi, a real snap packager here. In comparison to flathub the devs are not required to publish their snapcraft.yamls but the store won’t accept an app with privileged access. By default you can’t even connect to dbus. You go to the forum, link your snapcraft.yaml and explain why you need the access. The process is the same with plugs that don’t auto connect, which ones are those you can read here. You can upload an app with a plug that doesn’t auto connect but your users will have to manually do so.
The requirements for classic snaps (no confinement) are much stricter and the admins are careful about granting that privilege. The store also makes it clear whether a package is official or from a star developer so if the app is going to handle sensitive data, you probably won’t trust an unverified developer.
As for the walled garden, you’re free to share your .snap files and their snapcraft.yamls anywhere you want. Canonical has control of the central store but nothing can stop you from having a repo with snaps that your users install locally. The vast majority of apps won’t do that because there’s no reason to, but you can. I know Obsidian Notes used to do that at some point.
Snaps are for sure in second place here
I like the idea of it, but I had to install flatseal to get a bunch of really important things like password managers to work.
I would like to see the experience improve, especially things where casual users won’t know how to do it themselves.
Once everything is set up it’s very nice though.
Installing Flatseal is hardly a huge chore. But I agree the whole thing should be more seamless.
I like snap but this is still hilarious.
Snaps filled up my root directory with all their ridiculous and mandatory backups. I had to get rid of them. Flatpaks are alright, but nothing beats native packages.
You can use
snap set system refresh.retain=Numberto change the number of stored versions. It’s unfortunate it filled up your storage but in case a dev pushes a faulty update, all you have to do issnap revert app
Snap is fine
But a proper package manager is better, and we already had that.
All my packages manage to get seized by law enforcement
You must be using the wrong repositories… try enabling
apt --please-dont-track-me-fbi
