Why Flatpak? Isn't Snap enough?

[Simon McVittie]

On Tue, 02 Jan 2018 at 18:33:53 +0000, N. W. wrote:
> Why develop Flatpak and Snap? Why not collaborate on Snap only?

You could say the same thing about Snap and Flatpak the other way round,
or about Linux and FreeBSD (either way round), or CentOS and Arch Linux
(either way round). In each case, the reason is: while the goals of the
two projects in a pair overlap, they are not identical; and the people
doing the work believe (rightly or wrongly) that the project they are
working on has enough advantages over the other one, when used to achieve
their particular goals, to be worth their effort.

Snap has advantages over Flatpak for some uses. Two of those are that
its scope is wider/more universal, and it uses an LSM (AppArmor) to label
processes in a way that's readily visible to the kernel and user-space.

Flatpak also has advantages over Snap for some uses. Two of those are that
its narrower scope makes it more focused on the use-cases it does support,
and it provides useful sandboxing even on systems that do not enable a LSM
or enable an incompatible non-AppArmor LSM (AppArmor and SELinux can't be
"stacked", the ability to stack major LSMs is a time-consuming feature to
develop, and some distributions already require SELinux, so this matters
a lot). You'll notice those are diametrically opposed to the advantages
I mentioned for Snap: you can't have both, and the one you should choose
as more important depends on what your goals are. Different goals lead to
different choices, and those choices can be advantages or disadvantages,
depending on what you want to achieve.

Open source development is not zero-sum - many of the things Flatpak
developers work on also help Snap, and vice versa.

> This is not meant to offend anyone.

If that's true (and you're not just trolling), then I don't think you
have achieved your goal. Dismissing people's hard work as not being a
"sane" thing to do is not a very effective way to change their minds,
regardless of whether your criticisms are grounded in true facts.

If you aim to influence volunteer projects, I would recommend doing so by
helping to do the work. If you think Snap is better than Flatpak, please
spend your time on improving/helping Snap, not on disrupting Flatpak.

    smcv