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Comment by vorpalhex | Hacker News Reader

I've been daily driving Linux for a few months now.

Snaps rarely work. Like they install fine and launch but you can't upload photos on chat programs or load your existing config.

Flatpak is somewhat better in that file access seems to behave as expected but many flatpak apps still have serious issues.

Please just publish as a normal, plain old apt. Security is great but it only matters if I can actually do useful things with my computer. The last thing desktop linux needs is some pain in the ass badly setup sandboxing system that half works.

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To me, Snap and Flatpak are less about security than they are about universal application distribution that doesn't rely on third party maintainers and is free of conflicts. There are much simpler ways to achieve that goal[0], but the fragmentary nature of the Linux Desktop community makes the necessary standardization all but impossible. Similar to your statement about security, I loathe the traditional package manager/repo model because it consistently makes software unavailable to me either because it is missing from the repo, isn't updated yet, isn't maintained at all, or has library conflicts. All of its supposed advantages are useless if I can't actually run software.

To that end, I've put my money on Flatpak. I have my issues with it, both in practice and in design, but it isn't as user-hostile as Snap and seems decently popular and growing.

[0] AppImage is a valiant attempt, but simple AppDirs before it were much simpler

I've only come across a few AppImage apps in the wild but they have worked flawlessly. My only complaint is that installing their desktop icons is a bit of a doing and should be automatic - but that is a very fixable problem.

Appimages are the only ones I ever bother with, and everything snap/flatpak related is removed as soon as possible. I spent enough time trying to debug the others to know they really arent worth the trouble.

I love AppImage, but unfortunately they seem to be generally ignored. Very few projects distribute AppImages and there doesn't seem to be any momentum behind their adoption.

A lot of project maintainers are very open to people porting their project to other distribution methods.

As long as you setup CI, it should be pretty self maintaining in most cases too.

No experience building AppImages but if it's something you can contribute to projects, that is the best way to see more of them in use. This is a big part of how a lot of apps got on flatpak.

unrelated to snaps but i just helped a relative get back into dual booting. apparently i had told them about "kde neon" and they had used youtube to dual boot. ended up with a broken grub. "ow. why does it say grub rescue".

i made them get a live usb, install anydesk and then found out https://askubuntu.com/a/531448

which immediately helped the kid reuse his pc. the surprise on the phone was genuine. "it worked".

and i kinda wished it should have because the "baby duck syndrome", this would've been the linus popos event for this person.

i really think we need to improve some sort of "youtube basic linux tutorials", because apparently text is old school now (thats what i've been told)

are there youtubers who i can recommend to new users who can help people to ease into the linux community until they can learn their way across even basic troubleshooting their systems?

>youtube basic linux tutorials

Well i don't help with that, it's too slow and not searchable, the linux terminal is text and so are manpages...on the other-hand i also don't care if someone wants to use a *nix.

The (original) problem is: for mature apps, it's often not just an apt / .deb that needs publishing.

It's also a RPMs, Arch AURs, Gentoo err things (let alone *BSD systems), and various flavours of repos / interfaces with packagers / downstream systems and release cycles...

> Please just publish as a normal, plain old apt.

I personally would prefer appimage or tarball bundle (like Mozilla does).

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