Snaps, Flatpaks and AppImages Do Very Different Things! (Each Has Its Purpose)

Linux users love to debate the merits or lack thereof regarding Snaps, Flatpaks and AppImages. One of the things that really bothers me is that so many Linux users don't understand that Snaps, Flatpaks and AppImages DO NOT do the same things. They are very different and thus, each has its reason to exist.

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[theretromillennial]

Interesting. I already understood the different use cases for AppImage packages, but never realized that Snaps were geared toward the server. That actually makes a lot of sense. Thanks DT.

[jotix]

flatpaks can be installed in user space without any aditional permissions

[francesay]

The backend for snaps is entirely proprietary and canonical is currently engaging in anti-competiitve practices vs flatpaks. I don't care who you are, there is no reason to ever defend either of these behaviors.

[master]

3:45 Flatpaks don't need root permission

[rhiethreal]

You're missing something very important. Ubuntu is pushing snaps on a desktop distro. Even when people enter a command to install it as one thing in terminal, Ubuntu is ignoring that and installing something else. You completely ignored this fact though. Curious.

[Zephyroths]

snaps really makes sense when you look it from server perspective. the argument about snaps having slow startup time? for a server that you wouldn't turn off for a long time it's a very minuscule annoyance compared to when it happen on desktop. if that doesn't tell you where Canonical focus lies on, I don't know what will

[OSSMaxB]

I would still argue that canonical should drop Snaps for Flatpak, but only for desktop applications. In my opinion that would be a win-win situation because they can fully focus on making snap the best it can be on the server and rely on existing community efforts around flatpak in the desktop application space.

The main reason they don't do that is probably because they want to earn revenue from companies selling their proprietary applications via the snap store.

[flyinghippo]

"We just need to calm down a bit" is a universal truth, whether it's about packaging formats, distros, game consoles, politics, or anything else.

[peterheggs]

As an individual, I prefer using Firejail as a sandboxing tool and manually packaging applications that are not readily available. I do not find any practical application for using flatpaks, snaps, or AppImages in my personal usage. However, this is simply a matter of personal preference. It is one of the reasons why I have a fondness for Linux, as it affords me the flexibility to make such choices.

[mars]

Always bringing reason-ability to the FOSS and open source movement. Thank you Derek! I was slow to warm up to snaps, but they totally remove any argument for most window users not to try and switch to Linux. While also being incredibly practical. You can keep things neat and tidy to specific programs without having the clog the system with many settings. The settings are all in the snap!

Thank you so much. I've been telling that to people for years. But nobody is listening. And honestly if Flatpak doesn't drastically change direction and starts supporting server use cases then the only packaging format that can actually replace everything else is and will be Snaps.
And I hate when people start hating on Snaps and like telling Canonical to divest from that tech instead of using all of that negative energy to actually do something good and yell at the Canonical as loudly as possible to open source the backend and actually make snaps more distributed and completely foss.

[jenreiss]

I wish nixpkgs had a nice user facing gui frontend. It's a fantastic, sandboxed packaging system that has made my dev job much much easier and cleaner

[udittlamba]

I personally am a big fan of flatpaks. recently distro hopped to fedora and the native firefox had codec issues for twitch and whatnot.
i just removed that and installed the flatpak version and boom, everything is working again! Since they bundled everything in the sandbox,
I didn't have to worry about any missing dependency at all.

[nezu_cc]

Here is the AUR land we take your snaps, flatpacks, or whatever, unpack them, and re-package them as a native pacman package. And this is beautiful. Everything is a native package, and everything integrates well with the system. And almost everything is in the AUR. I don't have to worry about what is where, If it's not on the AUR it will be in a few hours once I finish making the PKGBUILD for it ;)

[omega_no_commentary]

Removing snap from my desktop ubuntu installation has cut my OS boot time in half. I only had the preinstalled snaps like firefox and have never installed a snap myself.

Snaps run a lot of stuff at boot, they are proprietary, they come preinstalled and they take over the package manager. Doing "apt install" will sometimes install the snap and purging snap from your system is a long and complicated process if you want to get rid of every trace of them.

Snaps also take more time to open, but thats just the least of my concerns with them. They might be okay for ubuntu server but dont force desktop ubuntu flavors into snap. It really sucks for desktop use and should not be a thing for those kinds of distros.

[chaslinux]

Great video DT! Going to point to this URL in some of our docs. I love AppImages because they make it easy for the few people we have who don't have Internet to switch to Linux. I can download the programs they need and give it to them on a flash drive. Glad to see the coverage of updates in this discussion. We use a few snaps in our image. While there are things I don't love about snaps, they definitely have their uses. Heck, the odd program I'll compile if I really want it. Thanks again for the great video.

[mariojpalomares]

I will say that when it comes to flatpaks, I guess it all depends on the distro you are using. Linux mint for example has turned flatpaks 100% rootless right out from a fresh install. Tightly integrated with the software manager center and update manager all without having to touch a single command. You could even backup the whole entire flatpak framework to restore for just in case without having to redownload all those apps again.

[qballup]

Very well explained DT. I like the way you explained the three package formats by way of comparison.
It really brought the concept behind the creation of them into focus for me. Great video as always.

[henrymach]

I love appimages and use them extensively. But the theme thing is really a hassle. The program naming thing is the main reason I avoid flatpaks

[xard]

I really want to like appimages despite how the maintainer just keeps dropping the ball time after time again.