I wish canonical would see the writing on the wall and abandon snaps.

I'd like to see more people donate to the XDG Desktop Portals project. They are doing a great job improving the security of the linux desktop and deserve the support!

Until Arch says: "flatpaks/snaps or bust", tis the repositories and AUR for me. I've looked at both FP and Snaps, and while understandably nice for the devs, it still ain't "there" for the user who has years of experience with their own repositories or just grabbing and building from git. Out of the two though, if I had to choose, it would be flatpak.

Its funny, we are completing a full circle only because dynamic linking (DLL, .SO, etc). 1. software is static linked. shiping to another computer works fine 2. "no, you should use dynamic linking, so you need to update only one thing the security propagate to all your software" 3. it fucks everything up, creates more security holes than fix security holes while making maintenance a living hell 4. now there's a package manager to deal with dll/dependency hell FOR EACH OPERATING SYSTEM 5. now there's operating systems that only exists because of a different package manager 6. still a pain in the ass to deal with shipping to different operating systems with different versions of libs and dependencies, even when they use the same or compatible kernels 7. now there's a package system that defeats the whole purpose of dynamic linking 8. back to static linking, but with extra steps

''Flatpak Is Going To Take Over The Linux Desktop'' Not in my House!

I'm fine with flatpaks being a thing, and being popular on top of that. I just hope, apps won't suddenly _require_ being installed this way. I'm even fine with using them myself - where it makes sense for me. For example if I had to use a system where I don't have root access. Just like I would be probably using Homebrew if I were on MacOS. Still, the whole point of Linux distributions is that they package software for you and make it easily available, configured in a certain way. Using solely Flatpaks would take away this possibility. We would have to make do with whatever defaults the original developer picked and could not opt to receive a more uniform experience - from our preferred distribution

I was really hoping that nix would be preferred

as an arch user for my use case atleast main repos and aur are just fine , never had the need to use alternative method of package distributions

What are your thoughts on the nix package manager?

If flatpaks ever become the main way to distribute applications I just hope it won't end up completely centralized on flathub or whatever.

I wonder what team Canonical were smoking when they decided that they are going to have a loopback device for each snap, I was a big advocate for Ubuntu Server, their reliance on snaps made me reconsider because it's a nightmare to get snaps working under Docker. On the desktop it is just painful to have two competing things that do the same thing, snaps fail because of the single snap store requirement, that goes against open source.

The funny thing about flatpaks, snaps, and other containerized formats is, they defeat the point of having an OS made of a zillion reusable libraries. Linux installs are going to get a lot bigger from all the duplicate libraries running in different sandboxes, kind of like Windows apps with their duplicate proprietary licensed libraries.

Well, better flatpak than snap. Though personally I prefer to install through package manager. Every moving part can fail/cause issues, and sandboxing is definitely quite a moving part.

I tend to agree. I replaced every snap package with a flatpak equivalent where it was available on Flathub. Then I replaced many of my apps installed with apt with flatpak versions in order to have a recent version plus future updates.

flatpaks have served me well when the AUR had package problems. It really is best for core programs that need stability. As much as they seem "universally" compatible, they can go out of date if a display protocol updates too much. I did have that issue with a Wayland protocol going out of date and causing a flatpak to fail to start. Thankfully a quick talk with the dev had an update pushed that immediately addressed the protocol update.

I only have 2 apps that are outside pacman or yay availability, and they are AppImages, I've tried their flatpak versions and had weird issues so just went back to AppImage. I think if I had a lot of apps however I would go the flatpak route as the ability to update via flatpak is much more convenient. Currently the two apps check for new version when they start up and it's very easy to get the new version, it's fine. Oh, and AppImage Launcher puts them on Rofi menu, so there's no hustle there. I think with the momentum Flatpaks have though, they will be the winner in this space.

I love flatpaks. At this point I try to install most of my applications using flatpak because they integrate perfectly with Fedora 36 and you always get the latest updates.

As a developer, I support the simplicity of only dealing with one deployment method. It's always felt backwards to me to have the distros be in control of what versions of software is out there. That makes the support story a lot easier. Linux on the server is well established, but to make Linux desktop more mainstream, Linux needs a way for commercial software providers to have a method of supporting the same version of software on whatever desktop. With distro native package managers (.deb, .rpm, etc.) you are at the mercy of whatever shared libraries are installed, and they may not play well. Flatpak provides enough app isolation that the known good dependencies needed can be deployed as part of the same bundle so the software works the same across distros. That's a huge win for support. It obviously doesn't solve every problem out there. There's some weirdness with Flatpaks as well. All I'm saying is that it tips the scales in favor of Linux desktop potentially being a supported platform for more specialty software. It enables options that just wasn't available before.

The binary format on linux, like in windows, is universal. A statically linked binary will work everywhere, you could unzip and run, just like windows. On windows you get a clusterfuck of different installers, there is actually no real equivalent of what linux has here, which is a big advantage Linux has had... in theory. The issue comes down to two things: Firstly the fragmentation of package management systems combined with the small user base, makes it very hard for 3rd parties to target "linux" as a whole. Generally the community picks up the slack on this and packages the stuff they are interested in, into all the different distribution systems, but inevitably this also leads to a bunch of outdated and abandoned packages. For example whenever Discord does a major update it breaks in Fedora for a day or so while the community fixes it, they only officially release on .deb. It's not just a matter of releasing each package format either, the bigger issue is what repositories you'll be in. For a commercial product you likely won't get in the main distro repo, resulting in end users needing to add either vendor hosted repos, or other 3rd party repos. Major pain in the ass for everyone involved. Secondly there's the issue of some core libraries occasionally breaking backwards compatibility, less of an issue now than in the past, but still happens from time to time. So that's where Flatpak fits in, it's a "distro" that your random developers and commercial vendors can target that can be used on any distro which flatpak itself supports. It should be noted that for open source projects of high interest, Flatpak is wholly inappropriate. Distro's should always maintain their own OS using their native package management, it's far better than flatpak for many reasons. Flatpak's use case is to help out those edge cases, situations where you might otherwise be going to volunteer maintained repos.

Ok I'm really digg'n the subliminal white-board, lol. And the content. I'm actually learning stuff from you! Your history lessons on Linux et al are also very illuminating.

Your video and KZfaq channel are fire! Please keep up the amazing work and keep it going! Love the energy!❤❤❤ ❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤

Yep... love my Steam Deck and have installed several flatpaks! Its great!

On KDE Plasma, I've had nothing but graphical issues out of flatpaks. Theming absolutely refuses to match up with my desktop, most of the time my cursor is four or five times the normal size when hovering a flatpak app, text rendering is broken and hurts to read, and none of the very few fixes I can find online work. I've had similar issues with them in LXQt and XFCE as well, so it's not limited to just being one of the many Plasma quirks. Flatpaks seem to be truly good to go only if you use GNOME as your chosen DE; at least, that's my experience, and GNOME is the last desktop environment I'd ever use personally.

@brodie is our your cup holder on the white board or attached to your desk?

I tried snap a couple times and the packages never worked right or have the version I needed. I just assumed flatplak was the same I'll have to try

I only install apps through my distro's package manager and would have it no other way. That said I don't mind flatpaks as they seem to overall raise the level of linux desktops.

When Flatpaks was new and I was on Ubuntu (with a 4 years old installation at that point) I needed a lot of software that was not available in the native repos or the additional user repos. Specifically GIMP. And I had a horrible time with Flatpaks. But that is a thing of the past and even though I am trying not to install too many Flatpaks, my experience with the few applications is pretty good. And having this format as a widely available standard format isn't a bad idea. And the sandboxing and access rights management are also excellent points. But I still prefer software that is directly tested and packaged for my distribution. I don't know if this changes someday, but at the moment that is what I prefer.

On my main Linux systems I've been exploring using FlatPaks over the distro packages, to see how well they work. After fixing the obvious theming issues and getting familiar with what is sandboxed, so far the experience has been great over the year I have been progressively doing this more and more. There are some issues that I have to fix that don't happen with repository apps, but this also goes the other way around and mostly, FlatPaks are more reliable while up-to-date for me.

have you tried flatpaking Editor, Profiler and Debuggers ? or Channels like snap ? 😂

Popularity has it's use case... but ideally it should not be @ the expense of the "suckless" low overhead (and smaller attack surface) of the oldschool way of doing things. Universal adoption... has a tendency to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Since abaddoniung manjaro near the beginning of this year, i have been using flatpaks for practically everything i couldn't get from my distro repos, haven't had a problem since.

My only gripe with flatpak is how efforts aimed towards backwards compatibility are largely ignored. I think a gnome-generic runtime is needed, and only exact versions are needed for sensitive applications

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My problem with Flatpak is say you want to download Tor Browser. With flatpak it's a 700mb download and takes 2gb of hard drive space. That alone is bigger than some entire distros. And then I download Shortwave, and basically another 700mb... Shortwave is roughly 30mb through apt. Tor is 1/10th the size in apt.

Canonical could give up on desktop snaps and market is an explicitly server and embedded solution, that's where they invested a lot of the development time and that's what actually makes them money.

So many printers that work on Linux do not have Flatpak drivers, same for Snaps.

Can I open app images on my steam deck with flatpak? Im linux noob pardon me

I’ve had issues with flatpak b4 (steam not seeing my second drive) I’ll try it again soon tho

Thanks, but I prefer Appimage. If I would need another level of abstraction above my OS aka tonns more of a new holes in security and targets for exploits with a promise of perhaps fixing bare OS ones, I would use a firejail, virtual machine, podman or any other non obligatory option.

glad I'm using Nixos and not deprecated Arch that has to use multiple packages

Personally, I don't care what crossplatform package manager is used, whether it be snaps, appimage, or flatpak. I personally use Flatpak a ton on my desktop, but it really does fall apart when I try to use the app in CLI or with hidpi displays. I don't really like snaps just because they're slow but I won't deny that its somewhat nice that it's preinstalled and being pushed on Ubuntu. Do I wish that it were decentralized? Yeah. But when user x decides to go from Ubuntu to Fedora or Arch, instead of figuring out what the package is called on that package manager, they can just use the existing name and configs sync over no issue.

immutable distros are better for Updates and OEM approval, it updates without any change of breakage of the system that the user could do and this would be able to make Linux phones more usable like Ubuntu touch is in comparison to something like Plasma mobile

i use all type of packages , snap , flatpak , appimages , what ever works is get installed ... 🙃

Wait, are you implying there isn't a single immutable distro that uses Snap instead of Flatpak ? Interesting.

There's a spelling error in the description :troll:

but flatpak arent good for terminal application or servers....

In 2017 I tried Ubuntu… I abandoned it after 3 months. In 2021 I used Elementary OS for a year. I only stopped as I needed to give away that computer. In 2023 I got a Steam Deck, and love it. Flatpaks at each step made or broke my use of Linux.

To me the Snaps vs FlatPak war reminds me of the video format wars of the mid 2000s (2006) HDDVD vs Blu-Ray where you had two giant tech companies battling it out and were supported by smaller companies (the companies who made the moves and discs and the players etc) and with Flatpak vs Snaps you have something similar with Canonical with Snaps and and maybe there are big tech giants who give money towards Flatpak but right now I couldn't find any info on that however Valve with the Steam Deck are pushing Flatpak even further than it has before. I agree that eventually Flat Pak will take over. To me FlatPak is another easy method of installing your programs under Linux and it is something that I can get behind.

flatpak & Appimages are both great options

The problem with flatpak was the flathub repo TLS certificate issue.

Flatpak needs more work. I've had problems in the past with permissions and other things despite it being a "user friendly" package manager. Currently having problems opening a document in okular but I think that's an arch setting that I have wrong, on my void linux machine it works fine.

Why not appimages?

One very good combination with flatpak is the nix package manager is distro agnostic and has the biggest and most updated repo. It is the main pilar on the linux distro named NixOS

I love flatpaks, I think it's been a great way to cut down on the chances of cluttering up my normal system packages with stuff i just want to use or try out. I'm on Manjaro, and its easy to go overboard on installing too much AUR stuff and for the last couple years i just got in the habit of trying to use the flatpak version of everything unless something didn't work right, and i've never been happier with it. You kind of have to learn the quirks of flatpaks in what they have access to (especially system dependencies) but it's great because the one thing I hate about arch-based stuff is basically that you're kinda forced to do a whole system update just to install one thing. Snaps always seemed to just not work out-of-box as much and the theming seemed more of a pain to get right too. There's also a way to auto-update flatpaks (its hacky and not recommended but I use it on my elderly dad's system so he doesn't need me to update his chrome/brave browsers all the time).

Thinking out loud here: Would flatpaks make rolling releases unnecessary?

I just use pacman since you can use an AUR helper to get more software. I have no need for flatpaks at this moment.

I have mixed feelings when it comes to flatpaks and snaps. Right now I'm using them for software that it's in the repo of my distro, like Steam or Spotify. The most extreme example of this will be running Winamp using Bottles as flatpak. I like it's just works and is not cluttering my distro.

I only watched the first 50 seconds, so the land is *that* way. Obviously you didn't change that message.

Flatpak is great i use mainly them pretty much on Fedora.

I'd _prefer_ native but if I have to, I'll use a FPak. Heavier on RAM..

I like Flatpaks a lot! Flatpak first if possible. They are like my universal place for all Distros. And yes I also dislike Snap. My experience with anything else so far was quite bad and I saw many half baked native things.

I'm ok with flatpaks but i still prefer native packages due to me being a frequent terminal user and using flatpaks through terminal is a chore for me

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Thank God Flatpak is winning. If every distro went the way of ubuntu I'd go to Mac only.

I'm just waiting for the hardware to get better, so when compiling firefox gets down to 1 minute and everything else compiles in several seconds, we'll all switch back to the true best way of distribution: source code.

AppImages are the best. Flatpak is a bit better than snaps, but both are behind AppImage format

I like flatpaks but my issue with them is not respecting my themes and colorschemes as i am on plasma other than that they rule

Shared libraries from secure sources FTW

I just wish that there would be flatpaks for servers so we can get rid of that monstrosity that is docker.

I started flatpaks 4 days ago and installing a few things fixed my OBS theme magically and even fixed a theme for a program that isn't even related to flatpak lmao. Off to a good start.

and your hard-drive space 😂

You repeat a lot to make these videos "standard length", I really like what you do in spite of that.

If they have any hope they need to at least integrate support for qt environments. I can't stand having gtk windows all over my nice environment

i am not sure why you didnt mske this video some time ago (maybe well over a year ago, possibly 2 or 3). because that is how long its been clear that flatpaks had gained the lead in widespread general public support and overall momentum. in addition too just being overall the most practical for the most common situations that the majority of software falls into. i.e. that no turning back and the death sentence for snaps. now that might sound a bit one sided but snaps had their shot, they didnt win the platforms war and are now another betamax. it just isnt practical for the genera public (both developers and consumer) to have to learn and use so many different platforms. in addition to all the other existing ones we already had before. so therefore what i would love to see nowadays... is a video going over what is left wrong with flatpak. because clearly they already did enough right in order to deserve to get adopted in the first place. in this sort of open market. however flatpaks are not the perfect end game. so to get as much usable life out of this new platform (before having to ditch it for something else down the road that is even better). yeah, so what else can flatpaks actually has the room and ability to fix and improve on remaining stil. in order to be as good as they possibly ever can be one or 2 examples... i think is with wine especially. for example if you have a daw like bitwig studio. and want to run windows vst plugins under wine. that all has to be working in flatpaks. so i asked the dev for yarbridge what we needed to do here. and he said we need to make the version of wine inside yarbridge flatpak the same as the version of wine inside the bitwig flatpak. i.e. syncing the builds of each version of the other. and tying them together. however flatpak does not have that concept as a formal mechanism or cannot make namespaces or groups etc. so it turns out we would have to make basically a clone flatpak variant of yarbridge with a different pkg name, to denote it was a build compattible to a certain version of bitwig studio. which is hella messed up versioning. things like this could be improved upon such that when pkg a (bitwig) auto updates itself then pkg b (yarbridge-bitwig build) isnt ready yet. then it must be held back from updating until the other one has time to get updated and released. etc. another example might be security of flatpaks... another example might be commercial software pkgs or games as flatpaks. which again depend upon specific wine versions etc. those are all areas where flatpak's current implementation could be improved. to make things easier and less difficult to deal with

We live to hate snaps. It feels good to hate evil projects. Flatpak is the golden child.

I fall in the last category, I don't know why I watched this video🎥 :) But that's my life in a nutshell, anyways

Flatpak need a way for experienced users to intervene, e.g. to fix dependency issues

As a developer I dont really like flatpak because it doesn't really have a dependency system. There are runtimes but they are designed to make simple gui applications for desktop environments. This is the entire list of runtimes available: Freedesktop, GNOME, KDE and elementary. If I want to create a flatpak for my software then I need to manually provide the source for all dependencies as their source (and their dependencies) and build them from source. The main reason im using gnu/linux instead of windows is so I dont have to deal with doing manual unecessary work like that.

First of all I would like to say I am an Ubuntu fanboy. But to be fair Flatpaks are way better than snaps. I have had so many issues with snap e:g various updating errors. Flatpaks are the future and it is just a matter of time before Canonical abandons snaps. RIP snaps.

Please do not throw out the regular package managers. That would severely damage the stability of most distros. Flatpaks are great for specific applications that you want and care about to be up-to-date. Those include things like games, browsers and latest and greatest dev tools. For the rest of us, I suffer no ill effects from having OpenOffice version {$CUR_VER-2} on my desktop. Or Calculator {$CUR_VER-2}. And so on. The whole premise that you always need the greatest and latest software just isn't true for most users.

This week it's flat pack, last week it was app images, making a video on snaps next week?

IMO, Flatpaks are going to entirely replace user-facing graphical app distribution. They're so much more convenient for both the developer and the user, as well as being more secure and private.

I really want Flatpak to become the main distribution method. Paid apps/donations. Compatible with any desktop. Portals for integration. Easy to maintain and ensure it works everywhere. Finally Linux won't be garbage for developers (and users...) anymore.

Currently as a manjaro user, my priority when it comes to installing apps is: official repos, then flatpak, then appimage or binary executables, then AUR, the compiling manually from source I still don't like flatpaks because not everything needs to be sandboxed, they're large, and they don't take advantage of the distro's bundled libraries. They just seem more inefficient to me in general, as a user.

I'm an archlinux user, an honestly, if there's an AUR package, and a flatpak, I'll take the flatpak every time. I wouldn't touch snaps for love nor money. Appimage is legitimately crap, only slightly better than a zip file with a binary. But flatpak, I've got tonnes of them by now. Several emulators, pinta (which keeps mono off my base system), my markdown and latex editors, and a bunch of proprietory shit like discord that I want some deal of protection from

i really like flatpak because we finally have a somewhat useable crossplatform app distribution system, appimages are fine, but flatpak is better in my opinion, because it handels system integration better by default.

If flatpaks weren't sandboxed, I'd be more excited for them. I want package managers that installs my software into /usr/bin and other locations like a normal proper package manager.

The main flatpak advantage for me is sandboxing. Of course you can install some proprietary sh*t from AUR, but running it without restrictions is spooky (e.g. Discord is tracking you 100% of the time, monitoring your processes etc, and sending this info to its server). Previously I used em via sandbox manually (things like firejail exist), but flatpak is just more convinient solution. There are some concerns with it though. Not all apps have proper sandbox setup out of the box. Fortunately there are overrides exist and my global override instantly end up with filesystems=!host;!home; shared=!network; and then I manually pick what every individual app can access.

I dont use flatpacks or snaps. I dont even understand what 'problem' they solve and why people use this?

I honestly think Flatpaks are going to be more common than not only Snap, but also any other means of distributing software. I hold this opinion for a few reasons, but to see the trend, it is enough to see how much effort Fedora is putting into convert RPM packages to flatpaks automatically, and to see the plans SUSE has to drop Leap in favour of ALP. Whether we like it or not, Red Hat and SUSE are 'too big to fail' and take the linux desktop wherever they please. especially Red Hat, but even more so than Canonical - just look at upstart and systemd...

They are not the future. I hope it never happens, if it does, I will probably say goodbye for Linux and switch over to BSD. Thanks, but I don't need Flatpaks, Snaps, AppImages. I'm very happy with the native packaging format. They just work well, they don't eat up your storage, they have much better performance, than these container formats. I just like the native way, unlike Flatpaks, they always work for me. And if they are going to take this from us, then... Goodbye Linux...

I just want my apps in /bin, come on! I hope arch maintainers will convert packages from flatpak to regular arch packages like they do with DEBs, I love pacman, let me keep using it!

I like Flatpak and use it whenever possible. It's been great with only a few minor hiccups. I've thought for many years now that it's quite silly that we have all these different package managers that all do 99% the same thing, and so much duplication of effort building and distributing these packages. Flatpak goes a long way toward solving that. I don't think it's the holy grail though. It solves the problem by sidestepping it. You basically install a whole distro on top of your chosen distro in the form of runtimes, and that's the libraries all the software uses instead of system libraries Also I don't like that it depends on a desktop session to run. I think it would be cool to distribute whole desktop environments as flatpaks, but as far as I understand the technology, you can't do that. I imagined something like having a Flatpak runtime as your / and running a desktop and all your apps on top of that. Kind of like Silverblue I guess, but cutting out the middleman.

When i am gonna get an ssd based laptop, then sure i am gonna use flatpak, its command line package manager is also good, you just search a package with name and it installs, no building like as in aur, or checking if something is available in chaotic-aur. But as long as i have hdd, i am gonna use chaotic-aur and arch repos, as the flatpaks still take more time to open than native package

Flatpaks issue is they try to tackle security and portability. I just use bubblewrap myself. Yhey should focus on portability and abandon the sandbox fantasy as its created so many vulnerability and security nightmares over the past few years. Security should be upto end user. I prefer bubblewraping my apps myself and thats only to fix programs that ignore xdg standards. Personally i dont see the need for cross platform packages when all packages just extract the same binaries. Would be nice if flatpaks did support compression like dwarfs.

I try to avoid flatpak. Not an efficient use of drive space.

That is a frigthening thought. Though Flatpak is better than Snap you still have the downsides of containerization: slower, more memory wasted (talking about SSD-storage, not about RAM) and possibly problems with theming.

Best thing about Flatpaks is that you can get tons of binaries for Gentoo. Why install gimp from source if you don't want/need use flags? Also it sandboxes applications so steam and discord can't be spooky.

I really dislike the thought of flatpak becoming the main way to package things, i want things in my distro package manager

The worst thing about flatpak is being auto-captioned as "flat pack" 💀