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Comment by AlexMax | Hacker News Reader

I wanted to like snaps (and flatpaks before then), because trying to ease packaging and deployment of apps on Linux is a noble goal, but in both cases I eventually gave up on non-trivial use of them because they were always broken in some annoying way because of their sandboxing.

The latest snap I had to get rid of was Visual Studio Code, because I was trying to work on an open source game with it, and I found out that if I launched the game from inside Visual Studio Code, my game wouldn't play sounds because it couldn't communicate with PulseAudio, and attempting to use ALSA just straight up gave me an error.

On the other hand, I've only had positive experiences with AppImage. Gives you an all-in-one image that you can directly execute if you like, and no sandboxing nonsense.

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AppImages are a disaster waiting to happen. They are like Windows MSI installation files just downloaded from somewhere, running without any confinement.

You can run the AppImages you don't trust with the Firejail sandbox which has native support for AppImage.

https://firejail.wordpress.com/documentation-2/appimage-supp...

This is a nice workaround I guess.

I'd call it following the Unix philosophy instead of a workaround.

> Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new "features".

Both AppImage and Firejail do one thing and do it well, you can easily combine both and get what you want.

SELinux does the job better though if someone just configures it. AppImages should be confined automatically IMO.

Sounds like a perfect addition to a -- preferable, but sometimes too heavyweight -- repository-based solution like apt. Basically a more powerful binary tarball.

Gnome-Builder, the official Gnome IDE, builds flatpaks. I'm not sure how good it works, but idea is that one should imagine this brave new world of Linux sandboxed apps similarly how IDEs could work on smartphones. In the end the IDE must be either blessed with special powers or it must build packages for the sandboxing system. Gnome-Builder seems to take the latter direction.

I had run it via X11Forwarding (I had a contusion and used a puny laptop to connect to my desktop) and it was not a smooth ride, so it's not an entirely representative experience, but it shows that it's not all painless, yet.

AppImages are definitely the best, I just wish they had an easier way to integrate with the system. I know about appimaged, but I had problems settings it up, and it's just not as easy as integrating Flathub into Discover, or getting your packages from the CLI by accessing your distro's repositories.

I didn't get even that far with VS Code snap.

I realize I have to soon upgrade from Ubuntu 16.04, so a while ago I installed 19.10 to see what to roughly expect from 20.04, as there are quite a few changes. Trying things out, I installed VS Code from the Ubuntu Store; I was quite disappointed to see things going south right on the Welcome page, as the snap version of vscode couldn't even open a web browser (instead, Firefox promptly crashed every time).

Of course, being able to open a web browser from VS Code isn't a necessity, but for some reason for me it just seemed like the install was rather broken by default, and surely almost no one could have used it much not to notice a simple thing like that right away – and the thought that even if the problem was noticed and simply shrugged at didn't really make me want to see what else did not work.

Snaps certainly have some usability problems. E.g. to use videoconferencing in Chromium I had to give it rights to connect to record audio explicitly.

I expect you needed to do something like that for the VS Code snap.

I did that too, and it works for one minute, every time I start the browser. Firefox it is.

That's weird. I've been doing Zoom through web browser multiple times for hours since then.

I used to use it for daily webex until the snap broke it.

It used to work, with the latest update audio doesn't work anymore in Chromium (although it does see the device), I'll have to report a bug. (snap connections does show audio-record connected)

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