Snap and Flatpak vs traditional package management

[oO.o]

I certainly wouldn’t, no. These things are primarily useful for portability, you don’t need a package for your distro, you just need snap support.

Right, so saying snaps/flatpaks are worse than native packages* is a false comparison. Of course they’re worse. They’re meant to replace things you’d normally have to manually manage in /opt or /usr/local.

* Not saying that you’re making that claim @Ruffalo, that just seems to be the gist of this thread.

[Adubs]

I dont think they’re worse at all, just different. Could be useful for a different channel that your default repo doesnt have. It also brings software to the scrubs so we can all enjoy things. I dont have to think about how I’m going to get pulse effects on my fedora install, I can just install the flatpak. Thats so fucking nice IMO.

I feel like its a very linux userbase thing to say one option is shittier than the other. I’m not saying there arent some downsides to it, but if it was exactly like traditional package management, what would be the point?

I havent used snap enough to give a valid opinion on it but flatpak is cool, way cool.

Obviously if its available in dnf, im going to use that first but theres a handful of things I like using flatpak for.

From my understanding flatpaks also generally link to a repository so installing standalone flatpaks (like for example installing chrome on Fedora) will install the repo as well for updates. Correct me if im wrong.

You are not wrong but one side effect to this behavior is longer update times when caching repos. The more flatpaks you use, the worse it gets. Maybe this can be mitigated in some way in the future.

Its still better than the alternative… Attempting to compile from source, error, chase that error, find another error, rinse, repeat until you compile or become too apathetic about when it will end and quit.

I dont have a ton of patience and a short temper.

[IQCubed]

Runtime redundancies are a concern for me. I am coming from the discussion from a laptop user with no fleet of servers to manage and I’m very assiduous at updating. However, I’ve noticed with just the five programs I have installed, there are corresponding gigabytes that really increase the size of my /var.

Are the sandbox functions enough to offset that loss of disk space?

[FaunCB]

I don’t see an issue with universal packages like snap or flatpak. Its better than system proprietary packages, though there needs to be more for other architectures