Why Flatpak? Isn't Snap enough?

[Jasper St. Pierre]

On Thu, Jan 4, 2018 at 4:10 PM, Michael Gratton <mike at vee.net> wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 5, 2018 at 6:38 AM, Jasper St. Pierre <jstpierre at mecheye.net>
> wrote:
>
>> I think Flatpak has made great *technical* strides in improving and
>> rounding off the round corners of the developer experience, but
>> fragmentation is a social problem, not a technical one. The goals you
>> mentioned are *technical* ones: "use this containerization technology for
>> this sandboxing benefit", "integrate more closely with yadda yadda build
>> system".
>>
>
> Sure, but Flatpak's technology is what makes it a better solution for
> shipping end-user apps, which makes it the better solution for solving the
> fragmentation problem.
>

I'm not interesting in having a technology argument. On the Flatpak mailing
list, people will argue that Flatpak's solution is technically better. On
the Snap mailing list, they'll argue their solution is technically better.
Neither is right, neither is wrong. I have plenty of gripes in both Snap's
and Flatpak's respective architectures; places where I disagree with their
choices. That's OK. Compromise and empathy are a lot more worthwhile to me
than creating my own competing ivory tower perfect packaging mechanism.

So in the end, this argument should be taken to the snap mailing list,
> since it's snap's technical limitations that make it less useful for
> solving the social problem. If those limitations can't or won't be
> addressed, then people should start preferring Flatpak alone for shipping
> end-user apps, and reserve using snaps for what it's actually good at:
> Shipping server appliances like Nextcloud or invasive technologies like
> Anbox.
>

The rudeness isn't warranted here. Snap is a perfectly fine solution for
shipping desktop apps, and is doing so today, even if the denizens of the
Flatpak mailing list believe it to be technically inferior. The social
problem we have to solve is that people on the Flatpak mailing list would
rather insult Snap rather than collaborate or pay any due respects, and
argue that "we aren't the social problem, they are!"

That hostility splits the development teams into "us vs. them camps",
confuses users, and drives away developers looking for clear answers to
basic questions about application distribution on Linux. It's not a winning
strategy. The technology of Flatpak is meaningless unless it actually
accomplishes its goals of developing a saner distribution and development
platform.


> //Mike
>
> --
> ⊨ Michael Gratton, Percept Wrangler.
> ⚙ <http://mjog.vee.net/>
>
>


-- 
  Jasper
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