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[JimH]

" ... Now, leaders from the GNOME Foundation and KDE Foundation are ... building an app store on top of Flatpak, a universal Linux software deployment and package management program. "

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-desktop-leaders-unite-behind-flathub-app-store-heres-why/

[BryanC]

Meanwhile Canonical is abandoning Flatpak in favor of snaps . Looks like the One App Store to Rule Them All will be the next Linux fracture point. Hopefully our NixOS overlords can save us.

[JimH]

We'll step in and fix that.

[Hendrik]

Meanwhile Canonical is abandoning Flatpak in favor of snaps .

No surprise there, because Snap is owned by Canonical, and they have a vested interest into their solution being used. Its a corporate project, rather then a community one like Flatpak.

[mwillems]

Just anecdotally, I think flatpak uptake on the dev side is much more significant than snap uptake (i.e. flatpak seems to be "winning"). 

I've seen a lot of FOSS software that offers official flatpaks, and many programs are suggesting a flatpak install as the recommended or default method of installation.  Flatpaks are also integrated into, for example, the GUI "software store" that ships by default with large distros like Debian and Fedora.  I generally prefer distro packages, but I've installed a few flatpaks where there was no package for my distro, because the devs made a flatpak available, and it worked fine.

Snap adoption seems much lower, and I've never seen software that actually recommended installing it via snap (although I'm sure there's some out there somewhere). It seems like an "only on Ubuntu" type solution, which makes sense for the reasons Hendrik mentioned, but is bad news for a supposedly universal packaging format. 

[Awesome Donkey]

I personally try to avoid using Snap or Flatpak (or AppImage) because of the potential security issues with sandboxing, e.g. with Flatpak https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux.html#flatpak

If I was going to choose one, it'd probably be AppImage. But even then if given the choice, I'd avoid all of them.

[Hendrik]

A native package would have zero sandboxing and generally always full access to your system.

[danrien]

I personally try to avoid using Snap or Flatpak (or AppImage) because of the potential security issues with sandboxing, e.g. with Flatpak https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux.html#flatpak

If I was going to choose one, it'd probably be AppImage. But even then if given the choice, I'd avoid all of them.

That's a good read, thanks for sharing it . I personally like Flatpaks quite a bit, and I use Flatseal to manage permissions: https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.github.tchx84.Flatseal. It would be nice if the permissions that are requested would be asked for ahead of time when installing, but in my opinion, it's better to know what permissions are used rather than having no idea what the application has access to at all, which is the state of affairs if you're installing arbitrary binaries (or AppImages), correct?