ugos

yep indeed, so to me (but I don't know if I'm interpreting all this correctly) Flatpack seems to push towards a PPA like system for distribution but with a SandBoxed App over one or multiple Runtime for execution

True Snap are technically distro-agnostic but still Snap is surrounded by a "brought to you by Canonical™" feeling.

Even if you look at the terms used : https://snapcraft.io/docs/core/store :

"The main way of distributing snaps to snapd systems is through the Ubuntu Store"

So indeed there is the "other store" section which mention you can host your own store but it's clearly not emphasized.

Even the term of Snap "store" vs Flatpack "repo" seems to indicates a more decentralized/agnostic direction of Flatpack.

On flatpak.org/apps.html you can see LibreOffice hosted by documentfoundation.org and MonoDevelop hosted by mono-project.com. They're not all hosted by their respective foundation/website, but still it kinda seems like it is the direction flatpack is pushing for.

So "technically" they all are distro-agnostic, but in terms of distribution system one is pushing for a centralized Canonical-hosted store while the other seems to be going towards a "each foundation will host their app"

"FlatPak does not provide a central repository"

This is something I particularly like about FlatPack. I hope we can go towards a decentralized package distribution system where the app store just has a list of official flatpack repos. You update the latest Firefox from the repo at mozilla.org, the latest Blender from blender.org, etc... of course this needs mozilla, blender.org, etc... to package the app (but they already do it for win, mac and .deb anyway). So you always have the latest version and it is provided by the official website and not a central Canonical repo

Switzerland (though it's not really a EU member) had a "votation" where people decided to expand some surveillance power, ProtonMail blog post about it : https://protonmail.com/blog/swiss-surveillance-law/ . Yet I think Switzerland is still not too bad in terms of privacy but for how long...

100% agree. Funny how when I was 16 my dream was to leave EU as soon as I can to go work at Google, FB, etc... and live the 'American dream'. USA represented progress and innovation to me.

Now with Snowden revelations, Obama's expansion of mass surveillance, etc... USA has become the exact opposite to me, they embody a future I don't want to live in.

The worst part is that some EU countries start to become like them because they still think like when I was 16, "USA is progress" => "so we have to do like them" and that's how for eg France adopted "Loi sur le renseignement" which allows gov to do like what NSA's doing.

Now all that I want is finish my CS master and start working for Protonmail,Signal,Tor,Mozilla,Linux,... or whatever company/app/foundation that is trying to protect us.

The thing I'm afraid of is that EU will keep getting weaker in terms of privacy & rights like France because of the "terrorists will kill your children if you don't give us your data" propaganda.

I hope EU will understand that even outside the ethical & moral issues having strong laws on privacy is the only way we can compete with USA tech because it's the only thing we have they don't

You're surely right, but to me the important aspect is not only to make a package that run everywhere but also bring the mobile security scheme to desktop ie have apps that are sandboxed and run on top of a well-defined runtime with well-defined APIs. In that sense Xdg-Apps have a bigger mission that AppImage so maybe we can't really compare them

I agree, sandboxing is a must-have feature. xdg-app has a system of runtime so it can run on any distro as long as you have installed the runtime needed by the app. Also GNOME and Papyros will have it while KDE seems interested in it also so it should have quite a lot of support.