Flatpak can’t run CLI apps. Also, they started around the same time. Flatpak in 2015 and Snap in 2016. This is like saying dnf shouldn’t exist because apt is a thing.
Why would Canonical abandon their own solution because some people online complain?
The question that I have to ask: what category of CLI apps (or even some examples) exist that are too complex to maintain a few versions simultaneously as native packages but are not complex enough to just use an OCI container for them instead?
Personally I use (and maintain) snaps for several developer tools I use, because the automatic updates through snap means I can have automatically up-to-date tools with the same package across my Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch and OpenSuSE machines.
Nix on non-NixOS distributions would be great, if it would support installing apps into the users home directory instead of a global directory (without recompiling everything).
(When I looked into it, it wasn’t possible, but if you made it work, please share.)
With snap they can release the package a single time, and it can be used across all of their releases. I think this is the main point of snap. Being able to use it across other systemd distros is just a bonus.
Flatpak is not a solution for packaging a large portion of the types of software Canonical packages with snap, such as database servers, kernels and containerisation software like lxd.
You’re just describing flatpack.
Flatpak can’t run CLI apps. Also, they started around the same time. Flatpak in 2015 and Snap in 2016. This is like saying dnf shouldn’t exist because apt is a thing.
Why would Canonical abandon their own solution because some people online complain?
The question that I have to ask: what category of CLI apps (or even some examples) exist that are too complex to maintain a few versions simultaneously as native packages but are not complex enough to just use an OCI container for them instead?
Personally I use (and maintain) snaps for several developer tools I use, because the automatic updates through snap means I can have automatically up-to-date tools with the same package across my Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch and OpenSuSE machines.
Install CLI packages with Nix. You don’t need a proprietary system
Nix on non-NixOS distributions would be great, if it would support installing apps into the users home directory instead of a global directory (without recompiling everything).
(When I looked into it, it wasn’t possible, but if you made it work, please share.)
I found this that might help:
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/how-to-use-a-local-directory-as-a-nix-binary-cache/655/13
Snaps predate flatpaks though.
Yeah but only in 2016 were they made available for other Linux distros. Flatpaks were available since 2015.
So why would Canonical switch to another technology that came after what they made and doesn’t cover their biggest use cases for snaps?
I’m not saying they would.
But if flatpak doesn’t meet the widest use case of snap, are they really describing flatpak?
I replied to:
Flatpak is not a solution for packaging a large portion of the types of software Canonical packages with snap, such as database servers, kernels and containerisation software like lxd.