So a few popular Linux distros decided to drop a few major packages like how red hat dropped rpm packages for libreoffice in favor for the flatpak packages.
If more distros decided to drop more packages from their main repository in favor for flatpak packages, then are there any obvious concerns? From my personal experience, flatpaks didn’t work well for me. If flatpaks become mainstream and takeover the linux distros, then I might just move to Freebsd. I just want to know if there is any positives to moving away from official repositories to universal repositories.
I’m a software engineer, but when it comes to configuring and managing my OS I think I have more in common with the average user than a power user. I just want to install programs and I want them to work.
The other day I wanted to install valgrind. Should be easy, right? I’m on the latest LTS version of Xubuntu. That should be the easiest thing in the world, just sudo apt install valgrind. Lo and behold, apparently I’m in an unresolvable dependency hell.
But turns out there’s a snap version of valgrind. Worked fine!
So what am I supposed to think? People bitch about snap, even here, but it works every time for me. Flatpak is the same thing to a guy like me.
I had the same experience trying to get a game (Stepmania) to work on Fedora. I could not resolve the damn dependencies. 3 hours later I found a flatpak of the game and it just worked immediately. I think I’m sold.
Same for me, snaps work everytime, flatpacks rarely do.
Firefox would like a word….
Forced snap+Firefox is hell
Not for me, it always works smoothly.
I agree that the decision to force users to use firefox as a snap and take away their ability to use it as a .deb goes against the linux spirit in a meaningful way, but the firefox snap has been working really well for a while now and canonicals ‘political’ games don’t take away from snap’s fundamental improvements over normal packages.