Comments on: Flatpak, Appimage And Snap – How Do They Stack?

By: Ben Guy-Williams

Ben Guy-Williams — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 06:59:16 +0000

It was badly phrased.
‘Package can be freely developed without causing a conflict on your system, reducing the risk of breaking… but at the expense of using disk space to store it’s own set of libraries and files’ might have been better.

Something I never stopped missing was the ability to find an application, download it and run it (with Windows). With Linux, you find your .deb, try an install then it fails because ‘lib.so’ is now version 4 but this package wants version 3… so it fails.

The snap/appimage etc actually do use more filesystem space but allow developers to give us something that can run with the newest available library at the time of creation, not necessarily the one available in our system and without the need to use a PPA to upgrade the system (and probably break something else at the same time).

I find synaptic/apt/PPA to be lacking in many areas – brilliant, but also lacking – and totally see the need to add a choice of an ‘executive’ file.

By: nigra truo

nigra truo — Tue, 21 Mar 2017 05:29:17 +0000

Quote:
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In this way, a package does not cause a clutter on your system reducing the risk of breaking the rest of your Linux system.
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You know if clutter means redundant, doubled and quadrupled files and instead of all like type files (like libraries) in their proper folder, snap / flatpak / appimage does exactly the opposite of what they should do, create clutter. Packaging systems like RPM and DEB by the way are EXACTLY designed to not break the system, they will never overwrite an existing lib or file that is owned by another program, thus increasing stability of the system. I’m curious how the experiment will go, especially snap, since all tools will come in that format. Shared libraries will no longer be shared, package sizes will skyrocket, updates will take a lot longer and generally RAM usage will go up. Will it go up to the level of Windows, where you can barely run the OS with 2 or 4 GBs? Time will tell.
I think it is great to have apps that run everywhere, but having the whole OS like this might be a really bad idea. I doubt that a Linux that is built as such would be able to run on 512 MB or 1 GB of Ram like the Raspberrry Pi (like Windows as an example cannot). I wish there was an easy workable way to use statically linked DEBs and RPMs, because…. that would EXACTLY solved this problem, with a well established super stable packaging system, instead of having to create a new one (or in this case, 4 of them)

By: Alexandru Băluț

Alexandru Băluț — Wed, 27 Jul 2016 15:05:00 +0000

“With Ubuntu Snap software packing format already being used on many Linux distributions” – What does that even mean?
Would be nice to know how Snap and Flatpak can exist at the same time on the computer.