Snaps & flatpacks

[Liam Proven]

On Sun, 6 Sep 2020 at 22:16, Tom H <tomh0665 at gmail.com> wrote:

> No one ever likes change. There's no technical reason to claim that
> snap-installed apps are worse than apt/dnf/emerge/pacman-installed
> apps.

Hang on.

I am not saying "worse" but yes, there _is_ a significant difference
between apps in cross-distro containerised formats and distro-native
packages apps.

You can compare Dpkg with RPM or Emerge or Pacman, yes. All install
the package's files into their normal native places in the distro's
filesystem and they can be run like any other app.

You _cannot_ directly compare these with Snap, Flatpak, AppImage etc.

These all work differently to native package managers, but similarly
to each other. All keep the package's files inside the distribution
container, and use underlying plumbing to partially connect the
package to the host OS so that it can run -- but the app is not _part
of_ the distro as it is with a native package manager. The app is in
an isolated container, on its own, and as far as the app knows, it's
the only thing on the computer.

You generally can't directly run Snaps; you need to run `snap
$packagename` to launch it, `snap remove $packagename` to remove it,
etc. They are not part of the OS like normal OS packages.

This is why, for instance, the Snap version of Chromium can't
configure GNOME Shell extensions. It's not part of the OS: it's in its
own little sealed box, with airholes so it can breathe, but it can't
interact directly with GNOME Shell.

This is intentional over-simplification, but I think it is correct in
broad strokes.

> Are you saying that snaps can't be installed on Arch or other cited
> distributions? I doubt that snapcraft.io would lie about this.

A new clean install of Arch cannot, AFAIK, install or run Snap apps.

In fact *only Ubuntu* can run snaps out of the box. Even Mint removes
Snap support, AFAIK.

On Arch, openSUSE or whatever, first you need to install the Snap
package manager, then the Snap package, _then_ you can run it.

Whereas, AIUI, any distro with GNOME Shell can run Flatpaks because
Flatpak support is built into GNOME Shell. Other desktops can have it
added.

My personal preference is AppImage. It doesn't need any supporting
framework at all. Nothing needs to be installed. You just chmod +r
$appimagename and it works.

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