I don’t think there are any distros that are pushing Flatpak as the ultimate solution the way Ubuntu is snaps.
Ubuntu’s aggressive approach with snaps would have been bad enough if snaps were the perfect desktop app solution. It’s a lot more frustrating considering snaps are probably the 3rd best new packaging option behind Flatpak sand appimage.
Snaps are Canonical's choice for "cross distro" package management that they are trying to force on everyone else. They came out of nowhere and it doesn't play well with other distros.
If you want a nice-from-first-principals approach to package management for desktop apps, Flatpak is the shit: it uses a Git-like distribution system that's specifically built for operating system size snapshots. You get to pick your underlying distribution (or roll your own) and the sandboxing mechanism just wraps around secomp-bfp so it stacks well with SELinux or AppArmor or whatever.
But now we are going to have yet-another-bifurcation of OSS solutions: RPM vs DEB, KDE vs GNOME, Wayland vs Mir.
I personally don't packaging apps in a sandbox, its a violation of the basic idea of writing tools that do one thing well. Still, snap gets lots of flack, but I don't see the same for flatpak. Is there some advantage to flatpak that I am missing, or is it just than Ubuntu has pushed snaps too hard?
Except with Snaps its a pain in the absolute ass to give an application access to anything that it wasn't shipped with access to. The whole interface paradigm sucks. With flatpaks its easy. That being said, I still think both of them are not nearly as good as the old way of packaging-- I want software that doesn't hide all of its dependencies (and thus vulnerabilities) from me by default. If the linux world could pull their head out of their asses on the desktop environment wars, neither would even be needed. Though I wills say, both are better than electron apps.
I take your point (it's the general point many use to argue for Snap/Flatpak/Nix/AppImage/0install/Homebrew/&c.) but if you want to ensure you're not replacing per-distro-package-manager-fragmentation with completely-arbitrary-chaotic-package-manager-fragmentation there needs to be some unity & consideration for what users want in order to ensure they'll willingly subscribe to your system of choice.
While I wouldn't call Flatpak "popular" with users per se, it's probably one of the least-worst alternatives that have come out. The horse Ubuntu has backed (Snap) may be the most used by virtue of being rammed down user's throats by projects with existing user capture (e.g. LetsEncrypt), but that's not going to make the debate go away: it just strengthen's the argument to return to distro packaging.
In terms of range of applications available though Snaps far outnumber Flatpaks. Probably because on terms of installs Ubuntu far out numbers every other Linux distro.
Personally I don't want FlatPak either except maybe for 1 or 2 apps where the sandboxing actually makes sense. It's still a waste of resources just to appease lazy maintainers.
Ubuntu went totally overboard with their snaps, putting everything in it trying to force it to become a standard. But FlatPak is not great either even though it is an open standard.
It's nice for the 1 or 2 niche apps that aren't available any other way, but for the most part I prefer normal packages.
Yeah I don't see the need for this tech anyway in 95% of the cases they use it for. Sure, packaging is complex but distributions have become really good at it. It's a solved problem. And for the security parts there's better solutions like AppArmor. For some exceptions it could be useful but not with the ubiquity that Ubuntu uses snaps.
In any case I really wish Ubuntu would stop this "not invented here" nonsense and drop snap entirely (and use flatpak only for the apps that really need it).
After Mir, upstart, unity I thought they'd have gotten enough of a reality check but they're at it again. And they sandbox way too many packages that don't even need it. Even some golang command line tools which don't even have any dependencies (they're in go and thus statically linked)
Snaps and Flatpaks are bloated, slow, and a downgrade on user experience at all levels. I use linux because it is lean, fast and has great package managment (apt). I'd rather go back to using Windows than use Flatpaks or Snaps.
And even AppImage, a solution I frequently praise mind you, doesn't always work right.
It's 2018 and the Linux Desktop still doesn't have a consistent way to... well do anything now that I think about it, but that you can't even reliably distribute an application is pretty insane.
Flatpak and Snaps are a typical Linux Desktop solution: Over-engineer the shit out of it.
The benefit of snaps is that developers only need to produce one file which will work on all Linux distros, but that means it doesn't integrate properly with any Linux distro. Flatpaks seem better than snaps but I don't like them either.
I didn't look closely into either flatpak nor appimage. But I get the advantages of such a system and I think it might actually help with the "Linux on the desktop situation". It's very easy to deploy something with restricted access to the file system, something that has all its dependencies in one place, that updates atomically, etc. It's also nice for random app vendors to be able to know that all their users are on the latest version, or not far behind. Could even push some devs to consider going back to desktop apps, as opposed to the web, knowing that they wouldn't have to deal with 1234 different, obsolete versions because someone's grandma didn't update her system in years.
After spending some time reading the exchanges on the posted link, I've come to the conclusion that the actual problem with snaps might not be snapd nor the automatic updating in and of themselves.
Rather, the problem seems to be a scope mismatch. This whole snap thing looks to me as something that should be aimed squarely at the "desktop user". I use that term as opposed to "system use". So distributing Spotify or whatever via snaps? Great! LXD for a home user to test? Sure! But as a way of managing low-level system components on production boxes? No way!
So I have to say I don't necessarily take an issue with Ubuntu pushing this on the desktop version. Sure, it is a pain by certain aspects, main one being slow startup for apps. But pushing this on Ubuntu Core in its actual state is, to me, the real issue. Sure, apparently you can run your own "Snap Proxy" or whatever they call it, which allows you to manually approve upgrades, etc. But why go through this trouble? It seems easier to just run apt-get from a central location when you want and for the packages and versions that you want.
It’s not even remotely close. Snaps take longer to load, still sometimes have theme issues, you have to manually install Snap on almost all non-Snap distributions, you’ll be littered with garbage mountpoints, you’ll have a useless snap folder in your home directory, you can’t add external repositories of any kind, and you get no ability to stop updates easy without going into duct tape solutions.
Snap wants to be a desktop, and server, system. Not with a 10 foot pole - Docker is literally 100x better. Not on my Desktop - Flatpak is superior there.
Flatpak and Snaps are a great step forward for Linux packaging and usability.
I think there's a vocal segment of the Linux community that doesn't understand what a major roadblock it is for the general user having different distributions having completely different ways of packaging, distributing, and updating applications. Don't worry, no one's taking away your apt-get, pacman, rpm, eopkg, makefiles, etc.
Ubuntu’s aggressive approach with snaps would have been bad enough if snaps were the perfect desktop app solution. It’s a lot more frustrating considering snaps are probably the 3rd best new packaging option behind Flatpak sand appimage.
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