I’ve gathered that a lot of people in the nix space seem to dislike snaps but otherwise like Flatpaks, what seems to be the difference here?

Are Snaps just a lot slower than flatpaks or something? They’re both a bit bloaty as far as I know but makes Canonicals attempt worse?

Personally I think for home users or niche there should be a snap less variant of this distribution with all the bells and whistles.

Sure it might be pointless, but you could argue that for dozens of other distros that take Debian, Fedora or Arch stuff and make it as their own variant, I.e MX Linux or Manjaro.

What are your thoughts?

  • boredsquirrel
    72•8 months ago
    • proprietary server (snap store), unlike flatpak
    • snapd only allows one server (but it is foss so you could just patch it), unlike flatpak
    • nonexistent security on snap store, multiple times malware, unlike flatpak
    • no sandboxing without apparmor and specific profiles, so not cross platform, unlike flatpak
    • the system apps are also requiring apparmor, so not cross platform
    • they lack granular permission systems afaik
    • they concur with flatpak, which is horrible as we need a universal packaging format, not 3
    • seemingly no reproducible builds?
    • no separation between all, opensource, verified repo, unlike flatpak
    • they pollute the mount list with all the loop devices

    And people complain abour resource usage etc, but that is just separating apps from the system. Flatpak does the same.

    • @hperrin
      22•8 months ago

      You forgot also snaps pollute both the mount list and the path. Whether you like or dislike the second is up to opinion, but nobody likes the first.

    • Possibly linuxEnglish
      3•8 months ago

      Not to mention the extremely complicated back end. Flatpak doesn’t need extra permissions because it is based on bubblewrap. Snap is doing its own thing which is incredibly complicated.

    • @[email protected]
      3•8 months ago

      I think the second point is the biggest for me: it’s almost like Canonical wanted to have a single dominant store for apps, as the ecosystem they are building supports only one. And, apparently, that one server is also closed?

      So if you try to make an alternative source and give instructions to people how to configure their snap installation to use it (I found this information very hard to find for some reason…), your “store” probably won’t have the same packages Canonical’s has, so users won’t be able to find the packages and I imagine updates are also now broken?

      Contrasting this with flatpak: you just install apps from wherever. Or from flathub. Or your own site. Doesn’t matter. No business incentive behind—built into the tools—to make everyone use flathub.org.

      • boredsquirrel
        2•8 months ago

        Yes, Flathub is important but there are many other repos. Nothing for non development though.

        I maintain a hopefully complete list here

      • @[email protected]English
        7•8 months ago

        Believe it or not, if you build something you can license it however you want. Canonical has long required outside contributors to sign agreements too, to allow just this sort of thing.

        • @Unyieldingly
          1•8 months ago

          They’re pulling packages from Debian and i don’t know if they’re doing Nvidia like stuff or not.