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Comment by offtop5 | Hacker News Reader

The author sounds extremely defensive, either ship a decent product or don't. If it becomes something where getting exceptions for sandboxing are so absolutely difficult most people skip it all together and ask for full access, you might as well just install directly from apt.

I also hate snaps, apt get install whatever you need, and be done with it.

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> either ship a decent product or don't.

Why the need to be so aggressive toward open-source contributor ? And most product become good through iterative refinement. Ship it and listen to feedback to make it better is a perfectly valid way to do things, especially for open-source project.

> I also hate snaps, apt get install whatever you need, and be done with it.

Then you are not the target demographic for snap or flatpack. I personally had to often install application that where not available on my distro repo, and the plurality of way to install application, plus manage their own dependencies, was a nightmare.

> the plurality of way to install application, plus manage their own dependencies, was a nightmare.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Also relevant: https://xkcd.com/1654/

>Then you are not the target demographic for snap or flatpack.

You know it would be great if they shipped default Ubuntu with a big flyer that said "don't like snaps? you're not the target demographic"

To be fair, as Linux users we generally can build from source if all else fails.

Now if you have some weird application which isn't built for your distro AND is closed source , you may run into problems .

And what about when apt doesn't have a package for the thing you want? You can install Spotify, Steam, Discord, Microsoft Edge, Zoom, and Minecraft with flatpak.

Usually their developers will have ppas.

And what if i do not use a debian based distro for which the ppa works?

Maintaining one package that works on all distros is a lot easier.

ppas doesn't work if you don't use ubuntu/debian. And not everybody was willing to go through the trouble of making a ppa, an AUR package, a custom .rpm, etc, etc.

You can install Spotify and Zoom with apt.

And Discord and Steam.

Zoom throws a `zoom_latest.deb` on their website with no repo, you just need to remember to go there and download it for updates, by hand. Given zoom's security record, no thanks.

Yeah, that's pretty shitty.

you listed Electron apps, a java game that runs without external deps, and something nobody would want to install anyway.

Absolutely none of those justify fat apps as they are already fat apps in themselves! I don't even...

Wouldn't apt give full access as well?

Flatpack allows it to work on all distro, isn't that the point?

Yes and yes. GP's point is that the distro's package manager is already an ultra reliable way to get non-sandboxed software.

Except it relies on benevolent volunteers to maintain the packages and make sure they are up to date for your distro. I think having a standard where the app developer can easily provide a single package which can be distributed and installed on all distros would be beneficial.

Whereas flatpak doesn't rely on benevolent volunteers? I think having a dedicated community where maintainers can easily pool their package updates together would be more reliable.

> Whereas flatpak doesn't rely on benevolent volunteers?

It doesn't on the distribution side. Yes it's maintained by volunteers, but the packaging and distribution is not, it can be done by the application developer.

So if I make a desktop application for Linux, I can do a flatpack build of it, and now all distros can install my app. Where as traditionally, I would have had to make multiple builds for targeting different distros. So generally, what happens is the app developer maintains a build for the most popular distro only, and there are other volunteers in other distros who try and repackage it for other distros and maintain it up to date, etc.

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