what are devs trying to do when creating snaps and flatpack?

Appimages are great for what they do. They’d be even better if we had convenient means of distribution. It’s easy for an intermediate-to-advanced user to go find the thing on some website, download it then chmod +x it.

A regular user, in contrast, finds comfort in centralized software repositories, where you only have to enter an app’s name and click install. Gnome and KDE, with the help of Appstream, provide Flatpaks for your convenience through Software and Discover, respectively.

It’s worth mentioning that Alexander Larsson (Flatpak) took some inspiration from Simon Peter’s (Appimage) klik when he was developing the precursor to xdg-apps and Flatpak, glick… What a mouthful :) Cheers!

I’d be happy to receive feedback on the downvote.

Are you on wayland by any chance? I had that same problem and it went away when I changed back to xorg (Debian 12 - KDE - AMD APU)

My OPT is that you should be able to buy and own your software instead of perpetually renting it.

I believe that deb packages should be first-class citizens in every project that distributes binaries since Debian and its derivatives have the largest user base in the Linux ecosystem.

I have mixed feelings for containerized applications since everything depends on your actual use case.

• Containers were first used by sysadmins to improve a system’s security through isolation of apps and services. This is of little concern to most end users.

• Then came the developers who started using containers to streamline the deployment of apps and their respective dependencies. Again, this is hardly an end user scenario.

• Finally, the light bulb moment: Containers can also be distributed to end users in the form of Flatpaks, Snaps, Appimages, etc.

They can be run like regular apps, with the inherited benefits I’ve described above (isolation + inclusion of dependencies). So, what could go wrong?

These benefits come at a cost:

• Isolation: clunky system integration (wrong themes, missing icons, inaccesible files). These can be fixed, of course, but not everyone wants to be bothered with additional tinkering.

• Dependencies: Having redundant libraries and/or additional runtimes in your hd may be a deal breaker for some, but I suspect less technically inclined users won’t mind the overhead.

I still love the idea of a distro-agnostic package format, but in the end, the issues I’ve previously described, add unnecessary complexity to the user experience. This is why I don’t think native packages are going away anytime soon.

Mysterious post indeed. Yet, it’s the asking of such an intimate, specific question in the most open of spaces what I find truly fascinating 😶