In place of snap OF COURSE.
I can state without any doubt that i had problems with 80% of the programs coming from snap..
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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Are they related to PPAs in any way? It seems like anything Canonical does to improve package management ends up sucking.
Definitely not me. I am on LiveUSB right now which makes my disk volume limited. And native packaging satisfies my needs (even when packages are old)
That is cool. I imagine it would be great to have an array of USBs with different distros for specialized uses.
For the most part, I don't even look at the version number when downloading packages. Most of the time it does not matter. Still, when I need something up to date, all I have to do is choose the flatpak version.
Nope, don't like them. Nor snaps. I find the sandbox nature annoying and many developers don't actually seem to understand it correctly anyway meaning you have to use flatseal etc. Then having to deal with some apps writing config within the sandbox and some writing it outside the sandbox...
My order of preference is generally I pick the "official" supported version as opposed to any community maintained ones. Then within that:
- Install via the language's package manager (cargo, npm, pipx, cabal etc.)
- Appimage
- Native package (.deb, .rpm etc.)
- Plain binary
- Build from source
- Snap
- Flatpak
I handle it by spinning up an lxd container to try new apps.. then they have the whole machine to do what they like, and if the install doesn't work or I hate the app, just delete the entire container.
lemmy was one of the harder ones to deal with because it needs docker.. I have a special profile that runs docker in a container for apps like that (I never run docker bare, it f..s around with the firewalling and breaks stuff).
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Nope. I’ve been running Debian for the past six years after I got tired of messing with arch. I’m over my shiny new thing syndrome and am happy with old but stable software. I’ve tried some flatpaks but the only two that I use are Spotify and signal. They take a lot of space and updating is slow.
I agree that stability is important, perhaps paramount, in a computing system. Still, some software like Cura, improve with every release, and it is worth upgrading for every new feature.
Anyways, I have never been concerned with space. On the whole programs don't take up that much space compared to everything else I would put on my system like games. Also, I am the kind of person who wants all the software they would ever use installed on their system. I want my computer to be useful even when the internet goes out.
If you’re playing games, then latest software in terms of kernel and libraries are important. There’s a reason why valve switched to arch as a base for steamos. For my use case, I do a lot of coding in C using emacs so thing don’t really change that much. To each their own, that’s the beauty of Linux!
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I'm running Ubuntu now and I'm in Snap hell.
It works well enough for some very basic apps, but for me personally, Snap has created far more problems than it has solved. With Firefox, for example, it makes it a lot harder to use some extensions, and FileBot is entirely useless without file system access (I mean, that's the entire point of the program).
I've heard Flatpak is better but my experience is somewhat limited. It could hardly be worse, though...
Each snap is mounted as its own filesystem, which is messy for several reasons (try making sense of the output of lsblk on your system). Flatpaks don't do that, though they sandbox in other ways. There really isn't a "Flatpak hell", the worst that can happen is packages that depend on different versions of the same library taking up a lot of storage space, which is a problem with snaps too.
I still prefer to rely on official repos but I do use a few Flatpaks here and there. But one of the main reasons why I don't run Ubuntu is because of Canonical's aggressive pushing of snaps.
I prefered AppImages, but now that I'm on Nix, I've gone back to native. Native packages work well in the NixOS ecosystem.
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I like containerization for server applications, especially when running different services on one box. For desktop use, native libraries are stable and usually the applications being used are single instance. I don't see a point in running desktop apps in containers.
No doubt the benefits of technology on a server benefits the desktop user to some degree?
Containerization does add complexity in its assembly, but simplifies things for the system overall, which I think is appealing.
Still, that is just another abstraction away from the machine.
Flatpak and Snap definitely make installation more simple. The packages come with their own dependencies so you have way less issues with conflicting dependencies. I like them when they are officially supported by the distribution or developer, but I prefer the official installations over supporting a random person making a package (not sure if this is a thing with Flatpak, but with Snaps that was definitely a thing).
Some software really benefits from not begin inside flatpak though, I had to switch back to the deb version of Visual Studio Code as the integrated console didn't have access to some software outside the package and was also logging weird errors.