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Comment by plausible | Hacker News Reader

I think Pop!_OS offers the most solid experience of Linux on desktops today. Apart from the lack of proprietary codecs by default (I know there are licensing issues, still I missed it), the default settings are pretty good. I reserved a whole day to set it up when I decided to install it, but right after the installation it felt ready to work, just needed to install some things and transfer my stuff.

Their decision to support Flatpak by default, to create a recovery partition which allows the user to reinstall the system without losing data (in a no-brainer way), and their overall attention to detail won me over. Kudos to the team for creating this distro and making it available for other computer brands.

Edit: typo.

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There's a sentiment of flatpak being a community thing whereas snap being a case of Ubuntu NIH, but isn't flatpak as much a RedHat lock-in? Is there a technical reason to prefer flatpak over snap, or is the number/up-to-dateness of available apps a reason to prefer one over the other? The info at http://flatkill.org/ certainly is sobering with respect to actual security gained by application sandboxing.

I'd really hate into being drawn into another energy-consuming VHS-vs-Betamax or BD-vs-HDDVD drama. I'd much prefer a single statically linked binary if at all possible (though it may not be given that browsers or browser runtimes on which many modern "apps"/packages are based have accumulated way too much crap over the years, which I think is the actual problem).

There is a one big reason. Snaps are only designed to use one central repository and the only production one is from Canonical. The server is proprietary.

Flatpak allows anyone to run a repo and for users to track updates from several repos. The server is open source.

Exactly the perfect recipe to keep a system secure, as proven by Android.

The bikeshedding over snap vs flatpack by some people is a huge drain on any conversations on Ubuntu these days.

Snaps work fine. Flatpack works fine. Both solve real problems that people have that the old ways of doing packages didn't solve.

Except with Snaps its a pain in the absolute ass to give an application access to anything that it wasn't shipped with access to. The whole interface paradigm sucks. With flatpaks its easy. That being said, I still think both of them are not nearly as good as the old way of packaging-- I want software that doesn't hide all of its dependencies (and thus vulnerabilities) from me by default. If the linux world could pull their head out of their asses on the desktop environment wars, neither would even be needed. Though I wills say, both are better than electron apps.

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