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Comment by qznc | Hacker News Reader

FlatPak is intended for Desktop only. "is not a good match for a server" http://flatpak.org/faq.html

In contrast, Snappy aims for much more "Package any app for every Linux desktop, server, cloud or device" https://snapcraft.io/

I cannot find how many packages they have currently. I hope that FlatPak has more than the 11 applications listed on the website. http://flatpak.org/apps.html

FlatPak does not provide a central repository, while Snap has https://uappexplorer.com/. After install flatpak, it takes three (!) commands (on cli) to install LibreOffice. http://flatpak.org/apps.html

Snap has stuff like pulseaudio (audio daemon) or ogre (rendering engine) in the repo. That seems weird, because these are not applications. The first belongs into the base system, the second into a development environment.

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"FlatPak does not provide a central repository"

This is something I particularly like about FlatPack. I hope we can go towards a decentralized package distribution system where the app store just has a list of official flatpack repos. You update the latest Firefox from the repo at mozilla.org, the latest Blender from blender.org, etc... of course this needs mozilla, blender.org, etc... to package the app (but they already do it for win, mac and .deb anyway). So you always have the latest version and it is provided by the official website and not a central Canonical repo

Isn't that the same as apt and PPAs?

yep indeed, so to me (but I don't know if I'm interpreting all this correctly) Flatpack seems to push towards a PPA like system for distribution but with a SandBoxed App over one or multiple Runtime for execution

The problem is installing always takes at least two steps: Add repo, install package. Maybe even a third: Verify/add key.

Snaps are usually published by the official upstream, not by Canonical. The Snap store allows them to upload their binary packages directly and immediately. That means you get the latest official releases without having to find out where to get the latest official releases.

pulseaudio and similar exist for things like Ubuntu Core which only works with snaps.

One would hope that Ubuntu eventually exercises some quality control over the snaps in their store. Otherwise what's the point of a centralized store? Currently uappexplorer shows a whole bunch of "hello world" apps.

We don't plan to restrict publishing of apps, but we can be judicious in which ones we promote on the front-end

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