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Comment by autoexecbat | Hacker News Reader

Is there any demand for this?

By Canonical, yes. By software publishers, maybe. By users... I mean, probably somebody somewhere?

I'm yet to read a positive review on Snap, and while traditionally speaking I would just go with the flow, I can only tell that my experience with the Snapcraft has been infuriating. I simple cannot make the product work for me because my bandwidth is too limited, and unreliable. I struggle to install anything from Snapcraft... I know what you're thinking "that's your problem, buddy", and I partially agree, but sometimes I wish these decisions would consider a bit more than your average city slicker! (same story with Apple, always a struggle to keep a connection going to their servers)

Actually I like using snap. Sure, it's not perfect, but for some things it just works. Sometimes it's really nice just to execute one line without downloading/extracting/installing stuff by yourself.

But flatpak does the same and has broad distribution support. The problem isn't necessarily that snap is bad (though, I would argue generally inferior in a couple regards) but that it's doing the typical Canonical thing of recreating a solution to a problem everyone else is putting efforts to already, just causing more general fragmentation of the ecosystem.

I wish flatpak had proper integration into the host system's CLI (like snap does quite well). flatpak run org.blub.foo is unergonomic.

Can't that just be solved with this?

   alias foo="flatpak run org.blub.foo"

I would bet flatpak doesn't do this by default since it doesn't hijack a native package's namespace in the way Canonical is forcing people with snap hijacking apt install, and gives you a choice.

This lets me run multiple different Chromium flatpaks alongside the native package (stock Debian apt Chromium, official Chromium flatpak, Ungoogled Chromium flatpak) without issue, for example.

to lock down core functionality and security updates behind new partitioning of core OS ? yes

.. /me looks to Redmond with awe

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