• rand_alpha19@moist.catsweat.com
    812·
    6 days ago

    I think I’ve landed on Flatpak as my favourite between Snap, Flatpak, and AppImage. AppImage, when it works, is nice though. Snaps are just kind of inconvenient (auto-updates are a no for me) and bloated and the things Canonical are doing as an organization put a bad taste in my mouth.

    • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
      26·
      6 days ago

      I’ve had bad experiences with AppImages. For universal format they do a really poor job at that. And it’s a huge step back into Windows direction that you’ll have to manually download, update etc your shit. Makes managing a bunch of apps a pain.

      • renzev@lemmy.world
        10·
        6 days ago

        The thing with appimages is that they expect the developer to have full knowledge of what libraries need to be bundled with their app, which makes it difficult to make truly universal appimages. In flatpak you just select one of a set list of runtimes and add any additional dependencies on top of it. Flatpak also re-uses the files for each runtime in between the different apps that use it, which saves a lot of disk space.

      • Samsy@lemmy.ml
        6·
        6 days ago

        But isn’t appimage the closest one to the app-system from Android? Since things could be really different on many clients an “app-container” is the best solution.

        Why not containerise everything? You need libreoffice? No problem, here is a docker or podman container.

        BTW. I like flatpak, too. It’s the most stable, but I never understand it’s mechanics. There is always another pack installed, freecode, gtk, qt whatever. Even if the system has already the correct gtk version, nope, the dev decided to use the gtk image from Ubuntu.

        • renzev@lemmy.world
          10·
          6 days ago

          Why not containerise everything? You need libreoffice? No problem, here is a docker or podman container.

          Flatpak is basically GUI-optimized containers. It uses the same technology (namespaces) as docker and podman, just with some extra tools to make GUI-related things work properly. That’s why flatpak apps don’t use the system’s gtk version – they’re running in a sandbox with a different rootfs. You can spawn a shell into the sandbox of a specific app with flatpak run --command=sh com.yourapp.YourApp and poke around it if you want to.

            • renzev@lemmy.worldEnglish
              4·
              5 days ago

              If you’re interested in another approach to containerizing GUI applications, also checkout out x11docker. It’s a small independent project maintained by one guy, nothing big like flatpak, but also pretty cool. The name is actually a bit limiting – it supports both docker and podman, and can run wayland apps as well. One of the coolest features, in my opinion, is the ability to run a separate X server inside every sandbox and forward individual windows to the “host” X server. That way you can prevent apps from spying on your keyboard or other apps’ windows.

        • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
          2·
          6 days ago

          I’m not too familiar with whatever Android is doing with apks these days tbh. I just don’t like how AppImages fails at the one thing it should do (universality) and doesn’t have the repo model built in. You can have third party solutions to that but it’s just not the same experience.

          Why not containerise everything? You need libreoffice? No problem, here is a docker or podman container.

          I’ve heard people suggest such a solution. Everything is a container and stuff is just exported out so that it shows up to the system like a normal program. Can’t really say I’m the right person to judge the pros and cons.

          There is always another pack installed, freecode, gtk, qt whatever. Even if the system has already the correct gtk version, nope, the dev decided to use the gtk image from Ubuntu.

          It can be both good and bad and sometimes it’s necessary. The whole system relies on being able to use different versions of libraries. But having them as separate packs can help in that programs can share those packs so as a dev you can just target one common base and have your stuff work everywhere. And sharing those runtimes has the benefit of someone else keeping it up to date while you can just test if the updated version works for you and switch to that if it does and so on. And with deduplication, runtimes and stuff share the parts that are common to both afaik.

          It’s a bit more complicated than just shoving everything in but also it’s less work than same thing having to be packaged separately for every distro.

    • bastion@feddit.nl
      4·
      6 days ago

      Auto-updates are a hell-no for me.

      There was a perfectly good user interface for updates. Then Ubuntu decides “wait… What if we made updates compulsory and effectively random and skipped the UI. The user can do system updates whenever they want, because those don’t matter for security or something, but these apps must be updated whenever snap determines they must.”

      Oh, snap!

    • Magicalus@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      3·
      6 days ago

      I used to use flatpak for everything, but I just dont have the hard drive space to store duplicates of my graphics drivers.

  • qaz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    62·
    6 days ago

    Fun fact: there used to be an Authy flatpak that just installed the snap inside

    • renzev@lemmy.worldEnglish
      46·
      6 days ago

      Oh, what the fuck!?

      TBH I wouldn’t mind it that much. The whole point of flatpak is that the developer can do whatever demented satanic rituals they want inside of the sandbox, and it won’t contaminate the rest of the system.

      • wax@feddit.nu
        31·
        6 days ago

        Yo dawg, I herd you like containers so I put snap in yo flatpak, so that u can sandbox in your sandbox

      • lengau@midwest.social
        4·
        5 days ago

        Flatpak has long had the ability to dump the contents of a snap into it, because snaps had already solved many of the build issues flatpaks were struggling with and they used similar runtimes for their sandboxing. It’s also a convenient way to convert apps over, since many apps got packaged as snaps before flatpak was really usable.

    • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
      2·
      6 days ago

      Yep. I’m selfhosting it now. Works great but selfhosting isn’t straightforward yet, still the best Authy/Google/Microsoft Authenticator drop in replacement with sync.

      • unrushed233@lemmings.world
        1·
        6 days ago

        Is self hosting even worth it for auth? I self-host ente Photos myself, because that way I don’t need to pay for a subscription, but auth is free anyway, and the backups are entirely e2ee, right?

        • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
          2·
          6 days ago

          Probably not but hey I like doing it.

          Just an FYI Auth and Photos use the same server program. I think you can already self host Auth just point the app at your Photos server.

          • unrushed233@lemmings.world
            3·
            6 days ago

            I know, but I use the cloud hosted ente auth backup method on purpose, because I don’t trust myself with selfhosting and I’m too scared to accidentally rm -rf my server and lose my 2FA seeds. That’s also why I don’t selfhost bitwarden, even though Vaultwarden is pretty great, and even offers Bitwarden Premium features for free (and I love it cause it’s written in Rust lol)

              • unrushed233@lemmings.world
                2·
                5 days ago

                I’m too lazy… Yeah I am pretty nerdy, but I still don’t want to spend that much time caring about my selfhosting setup and building a homelab. But I’m glad it works for you, and I’m glad ente created their authenticator in the first place. I would have never expected it from them, since they only used to make ente photos, but there we go, they casually just created the best FOSS auth app.

    • rbits@lemm.ee
      1·
      5 days ago

      Yeah, I mean the snap app shown above is being deprecated so there’s not even a choice. If you’re using Authy on PC you have to switch.

  • udon@lemmy.world
    21·
    5 days ago

    Once you discover you can just install the nix package manager with one command and then install everything with another, snap is out of the game. Even if you just use nix for like 2 packages, it’s already much better

  • NateNate60@lemmy.world
    2134·
    6 days ago

    Unpopular opinion: snap is not so bad and genuinely useful for many things

    I would rather have a snap than building from source or use some tar.gz archive with a sketchy install script

    • m4m4m4m4@lemmy.world
      432·
      6 days ago

      some tar.gz archive with a sketchy install script

      I just can’t… like maybe I’m too old and that’s why I still can’t wrap my head around how we went from “./configure && make & make install scripts are almost the de facto way to install software in linux” to “a sketchy install script”. We’re living interesting times at Linux

      • RoyaltyInTraining@lemmy.world
        7·
        6 days ago

        Last time I ran a corporate-made installer, it caused massive graphical glitches and lock-ups after waking from sleep. It basically gave my system computer-AIDS.

        That’s why I never run scripts which are too long for me to easily understand outside a sandbox. Official distro repositories and Flatpaks are the only sources I have some level of trust in.

      • WhatsHerBucket@lemmy.world
        2·
        6 days ago

        In a job interview I asked a CIS grad what the steps are to compile something on the command line and they had no clue. If it’s not “sudo apt install” they are lost.

      • r00ty@kbin.life
        1·
        6 days ago

        I remember those times too. The difference today is that there are so many more libraries and projects use those libraries a lot more often.

        So using configure and make means that the user also has the responsibility of ensuring all those libraries are up to date. Which again if we’re talking about not using binary install, each also need a regular configure/make process too. It’s not that unusual for large packages to have dependencies on 100+ libraries. At which point building and maintaining the build for all of them yourself becomes untenable really. However I think gentoo exists to automate a lot of this while still building from source.

        I understand why binaries with references to other binary packages for prerequisites are used. I also understand where the limits of this are and why the AppImage/Flatpak/snaps exist. I just don’t particularly like the latter as a concept. But accept there’s times you might need them.

    • babybus@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      29·
      6 days ago

      I would rather have a snap than building from source or use some tar.gz archive with a sketchy install script

      I agree, but that sounds like false dichotomy to me because snap competes with flatpak.

      • NateNate60@lemmy.world
        42·
        6 days ago

        I never presented this as a dichotomy. You know, people prefer things in a certain order, right? I prefer Flatpaks and native packages over snaps and I prefer snaps to building from source.

      • lengau@midwest.social
        2·
        6 days ago

        There are plenty of use cases that snap provides that flatpak doesn’t - they only compete in a subset of snap’s functionality. For example, flatpak does not (and is not designed to) provide a way to use it to distribute kernels or system services.

          • lengau@midwest.social
            1·
            6 days ago

            It depends what you’re trying to accomplish. For me, having the ability to essentially use Lego to put together my system is one of the great features of both snap and nix that Flatpak doesn’t cover.

    • cum@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      11·
      5 days ago

      snap would be better then installing from manual archives, but it’s comparisons are actually to your distro’s package manager and flatpak.

    • EtherWhack@lemmy.world
      22·
      6 days ago

      I’d rather be able to use my web browser uninterrupted without it being updated while using it and be forced to restart it.

      • lengau@midwest.social
        4·
        6 days ago

        The updates download in the background and will install when you exit the snapped app. If you really don’t want automatic updates, you can run snap refresh --hold to hold all automatic updates or add a snap name to hold updates for that snap.

        • EtherWhack@lemmy.world
          21·
          6 days ago

          Nope. There have been multiple times where I have my browser open, in the middle of something and when I go to open a new tab/window I get a blank screen telling me I need to restart FF to continue.

          • lengau@midwest.social
            4·
            6 days ago

            That is the behaviour that’s built for when an upgrade through a “classic” package manager (e.g. apt, dnf) updates Firefox while it’s still running. The only way I can think of that you’d get that with a snap is if you’re intentionally bypassing the confinement (e.g. by running /snap/firefox/current/usr/lib/firefox/firefox directly, which can also massively mess with other things since Firefox won’t be running in the core22 environment it expects).

            If you’re using the snap as expected (e.g. opening the .desktop file in /var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/, running /snap/bin/firefox or running snap run firefox), snapd won’t replace /snap/firefox/current until you no longer have any processes from that snap running. Instead you’ll get a desktop notification to close and restart Firefox to update it, and two weeks to either do so or to run snap refresh --hold firefox to prevent the update (or something like snap refresh --hold=6w firefox to hold the refresh for 6 weeks). Depending on what graphical updater you have, you may also have the ability to hold the update through that updater.

            Are you sure you’re running the Firefox snap? Because that sounds pretty much precisely like the expected behaviour if someone had gone to lengths to avoid using the snap.

            • EtherWhack@lemmy.world
              1·
              6 days ago

              I’m 99.999% sure it was, as it was within kubuntu using the default FF install (Canonical only provides the snapped version), and opened from either the taskbar icon or through its menu. Discover’s auto-update feature was also manually turned off. (was a system at work, so I wanted the config to be relatively basic but controllable)

              I did at some point completely remove snap and switched to flatpak. Eventually though, I went with the Mozilla Team’s PPA, as the sandboxing was adding too many complications with the addons along with printing documents.