LXer: Flathub vs. Snap Store: Which App Store Should You Use?
 

Published at LXer:

Both the Snap and Flatpak formats have their own centralized marketplaces, Snap Store and Flathub. Both are useful, but which one of these is right for you?

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They're both pointless wastes of time which could be spent on other things.
There was a proposed standard, which I can never find, for packages to be able to depend upon libraries without having to be formatted for a specific distro.
Just installing every application and all its libraries is not only very "Windows" and heavy on storage it's also more likely to lead to some "app" having an vulnerable version of a dependency. It is, really, just more people trying to be "cool" when coding rather than actually trying to help.

I like Flatpak. It offers a lot of programs that aren't otherwise available on some distro's. Like Sparkleshare on Void linux. Or a modern version of LibreOffice on Ubuntu LTS. Or Gimp on Debian. Etc. While it is moderately wasteful of storage, storage for most folks nowadays isn't much of an issue (I have under 10% on /, less than 3% on /home). And while Flatpaks are still a little immature, their design is meant to be fully sandboxed, which when implemented, it won't matter if there's a vulnerable version of something on the application, it can't affect anything outside that application. Yes, this needs to start being used before it's a benefit. To an extent appimage should be included, except of course that's the ultimate Windows way of doing things, download an executable file from a random location on the internet and just run it.

You make some good points. Storage is growing so, perhaps, (cloud included also) isn't an issue.
Perhaps "endless storage..." allows us to just use anything we want? Security seems frightening though.

At this time, it is. But the design of flatpak allows for security to be quite good, the security capabilities of the design just need to be used.

> still can't help but feel that just sharing libraries between programs could be a lot more straightforward.
Now I'm beginning to doubt myself but I am sure there was a system installed into Debian about 5 years or so ago which would reconcile library versions across distros. I seem to recvall seeing iot in Slackware (which I was playing with at the time) also.