There is still software that is only shipped through:
- Proprietary installer
- Snap
It would be great if they would move to Flatpak.
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2026
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Easy. Download "proprietary" installer (usually just a bash script with a compressed archive appended) and relate it with a quick PKGBUILD. Ta dah, native package for everyone to enjoy.
As much as I enjoy ease of use via package management, I prefer AppImage.
Although I have more flatpaks, the apps I do have under appimage tend to crash less often compared to flatpaks.
If an app is available as a native package, 10 times out of 10 will go for the native package
I however, would prefer a system without flatpak & snap. :tux:
hard disagree I much prefer appimages over flatpaks.
Long time linux user and I have a hard time keeping track of the differences between these 3 tech. This comparison did not help much. I can only imagine how lost people with less experience must feel.
All three are ridiculous. In what world should every application take two gigabytes of disk?
In a world where two gigabytes are cheap and software and dependencies complicated
As a professional nix shill, I can proudly tell you every flatpak I ever wanted to use is packaged in nixpkgs
Agreed, much prefer running apps via nix. Although I did have to fall back to flatpak install the bottles, but that is a bit of a special case where the software explicitly requires itself to be sandboxed or behaves less as expected otherwise.
I like Flatpaks. They integrate fairly well, they can be used on a variety of different distros, you can install them without root permissions, and they'll often "just work", even when the same apps installed through your system's normal repos have issues.
However, if they have one significant drawback, it's that they're a pig on resources. They use a lot of storage, and when you're on a resource-constrained system, they'll use more RAM and generally run slower than apps installed from the normal repos. (inb4 anyone says "unused RAM is wasted RAM.")
Doesn’t Ubuntu still ship with Snap? I don’t think Flatpak trumps that yet. It’s hard to say one of the other formats won when Canonical (or Fedora derivatives in the case of Flatpak) still mainline something else.
Canonical made Snap, so would be weird if they didn’t ship with it in Ubuntu.
No. Apt won.
Pacman won >:3
We heavily prefer flat earthers aks but app images aren’t that bad, like someone else said they’re like portable programs
Is this @pizzalovingnerd ? He looks just like him
Cool... if they won, is there now some money to invest in infrastructure or personal to prevent flatpak fuckups?
In light of recent events I'm referencing bullshit like just uninstalling nvidia drivers as part of a messed up upgrade. And the fact that they finally solved it yesterday resulting in download speeds of ~5kb/s for a 100+mb file because everyone and their grandma tried to finally fix their systems at the same time.
Mic drop! This will cause a stir!
But what about ubuntu servers, where snaps actually make sense?
That sounds even worse. snapd will just randomly "upgrade" and break shit. That's a headache on a desktop, but a total disaster on a server.
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