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Comment by purerandomness | Hacker News Reader

Can somebody explain who's the target audience for Flatpak/Snap?

Doesn't each distro provide packages for software?

The problem with package managers/installers/setup scripts/etc. is that they turn file systems in a mess and that filesystems tend to be different between linux installations, even of the same distribution.

So snaps do for user facing software what docker did for server side software. Good idea in general and since most distributions struggle to stay on top of release quality updates from upstream, a great way to stay up to date, quickly try out some sofware package, or download software that your linux distribution hasn't gotten around to absorbing into their repositories.

Sort of the Linux equivalent of dragging an OS X .app file to your /Applications folder (or to trash for uninstall). There's no good technical reason for application install/uninstall to be more complex than that.

Normal user facing software should not require modifications to the OS to run. The linux practice of packages basically taking a royal dump on the filesystem and generally requiring root access to even get installed is no longer something that is remotely sane to do.

IMHO, operating systems should ultimately be immutable and basically be similar to a snap. You update it as a whole and you don't modify parts of it.

Linux has had a hard time with end users despite decades of "surely this year is the year of linux on the desktop". Never happened. A lot of that has to do with software installation, package managers and upgrades being a convoluted mess that always ends up in somebody doing stuff in a command line terminal to fix.

Thank you, that explains a lot.

>Linux has had a hard time with end users despite decades of "surely this year is the year of linux on the desktop". Never happened. A lot of that has to do with software installation, package managers and upgrades being a convoluted mess that always ends up in somebody doing stuff in a command line terminal to fix.

Snap still has a little bit to go to be much better though! The "programs shouldn't mess with the system" mentality includes restrictions to the filesystem. That's a problem because many programs do need to mess with local files (e.g., sending a file in an IM program, working on a file, saving a file...). You get a spooky message about installing such programs with "classic" permissions, and, even then, such functionality suffers. Discord can only access some subset of the filesystem, and Skype straight up crashes when it tries. Also, opening links in Discord doesn't work in the Snap version while it does in the non-Snap version. Rabble!

But the idea is great. Convenience and no dynamic library breakage for some MB of disk space in ${current_year}? Yes, plz!

Yet their web based counterparts work just fine. Discord works great, Skype not so great, maybe because they pour resources into the app thay displays ads.

the problem is invariably with upstream making assumptions and changes on a whim, not with distros.

As for linux on the desktop, until there is a credible brand offering a credible pre-installed computer, via credible outlets, backed by a credible support service, and MS actually allows them to exist beyond the first revision, then you will have your Linux on the desktop independent of all the effort (or anti-effort) the big DEs etc put in.

Linux Desktop evangelists have been saying that for decades. Rather than fix any of the problems people are actually complaining about and that they can actually fix, they prefer to believe the real problem is one they have no power over so they don't have to take any responsibility for the terrible platform they promote.

> Linux has had a hard time with end users despite decades of "surely this year is the year of linux on the desktop". Never happened. A lot of that has to do with software installation, package managers and upgrades being a convoluted mess that always ends up in somebody doing stuff in a command line terminal to fix.

I couldn't agree more, and am glad to see that there are others who recognize this issue. Personally, I'm a fan of AppImage because it doesn't require any of the complicated runtime Snap and Flatpak do, meaning it is about as close as you can get to a universal Linux application today (*NixOS notably breaks them, but other than that...).

>IMHO, operating systems should ultimately be immutable and basically be similar to a snap. You update it as a whole and you don't modify parts of it.

Absolutely agree. Ubuntu Core is trying to achieve something like this: https://www.ubuntu.com/core

Most distros have an integrated app store for the usual suspects (Firefox, LibreOffice, GIMP, etc) but proprietary third party apps like Opera aren't included and are more difficult to install. The less technically inclined generally don't install third party software.

Security conscious users.

I don't want random software reading $HOME just because it runs under my user account.

I’m a little behind the times on Snaps, as I mostly don’t interact with Ubuntu via its stock UI. But I’m seeing other users complain about the lack of signing / verified publishers in the (proprietary?) Snap store.

Thoughts on the tradeoffs here? How sandboxed are these apps? Clearly I’ve got some reading to do.

They're sandboxed with AppArmor, which allows restriction to rwx. Checking an app's permissions profile can tell you what it's allowed to read and write. It's like SELinux, but instead of capabilities, it's a list of files. (But everything* on linux is a file*, so that's probably good enough?)

There is other tech involved as well, such as seccomp to disable certain syscalls (e.g. networking).

From what I read in the past year it's easier to build a snap (kind of building a docker image) than packaging for a distro: at least two formats (apt and yum) and several variants (at least the LTSes of the main distros). So the target audience could be the developers of the applications, not the users.

I'll be using Opera from the apt repository until they build a .deb. Then I'll see what to do. Disk is cheap but even my 1 TB SSD is not unlimited. My docker images for work already suck up much space.

it sounds like an alternative way to handle package management to me. instead of installing packages directly, they're containerized and run through whatever container system is present

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