Flatpaks, Snaps, & AppImages: "Do we really need these Universal App Formats?" - An app developer's perspective | Michael Tunnell (www.youtube.com)

submitted 1 year ago by ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net to c/linux@programming.dev

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[-] trevor@lemmy.blahaj.zone 32 points 1 year ago

I can say with great certainty that the only package format that we don't need is Snap. AppImages and Flatpaks both have their place, but Snap is just a great way to find yourself wasting time because their shitty fucking sandbox system doesn't work properly (and also doesn't sandbox at all if you're not running AppArmor 🤡).

[-] andrewth09@lemmy.world 29 points 1 year ago

[-] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 15 points 1 year ago

I don't think there were any standards for this sort of thing when Flatpak and Snaps first came out, and they arrived at the same time and have pretty big differences. So this doesn't apply.

[-] Alk@sh.itjust.works 24 points 1 year ago

The answer is "yes". Especially for noobs, they are a life saver. My distro's repository is missing a lot of things that I can easily get with flatpak.

[-] patlefort@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

It's also useful for big server applications like Nextcloud. I use snap for Nextcloud since it was broken on Fedora when I tried it.

[-] couch1potato@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 year ago

Honestly I threw Immich-snap on a VM and all my "Immich updates breaking things" problems went away

[+] Artyom@lemm.ee -13 points 1 year ago

No, you don't. Containers are the endgame of a bunch of dumb people saying "I don't like apt, so I'm going to make my own and it'll be better in my own distro", and now we have a hundred incompatible alternatives that are worse than apt, and no one knows how to deploy for all of them, so they give up and make a container.

[-] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Even if everyone agreed on Apt as the standard package format, wouldn't you still need to create multiple packages for the various different versions of libraries each distro will still have depending on their release cycle? As far as I know, it can be done theoretically, but since libraries can often break ABI, it's safer to bundle all dependencies, but then you're not far off from an appimage in practice.

Also, what are your thoughts on Richard Brown's (of opensuse) talk on Flatpak, who was a prominent hater of containerized apps.

[-] sip@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

if it's not in my distro or I can't compile it withing my distro's packages, I'm not installing it. I don't want the same library in ten versions.

[-] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 year ago

Flatpak shares libraries, so there are no duplicates of the same version, though there may be duplicates of other versions, as that would ensure compatibility with the specific app.

App image does not share libraries between apps, so it would potentially have more duplicates.

[-] sip@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

yeah, that's what I meant, multiple versions of the same thing, which always turn out to be 200-500MB packages like chromium/electron.

this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025

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