I wouldn’t even mind snap so much but the day I found out apt would automatically use snaps instead for some packages with no easy opt out was a step too far.
lol what are you talking about? One of my daily drivers is Kinoite and it works great. What flatpaks are you having issues with? Frankly, you must be being hyperbolic, because tons of people use tons of flatpaks without issue.
I simply don’t believe that you have 100% incompatibility, and I say that because I use a decently broad selection across several devices without any serious issues. Sure, they’re not perfect, but they’re a damn sight better than snaps, and in my experience, decently reliable.
Back your claims with data, or be prepared to have people like me call bullshit.
I mean I find it hard to believe but this level of argumentativeness is silly and toxic. Why would they lie? Maybe they have some edge case or misconfiguration. Maybe they got unlucky and ran into some kind of breaking bug on their specific system. Shit happens.
Granted, most of the apps I used were snap based, but some of them were flatpack.
Most of them were single-use “use this tool with flatpack” tools via github, so I really can’t remember what those were when they just didn’t work.
The ones I looked into why it didn’t work were always some filesystem permission stuff. Configurable? Sure. Not something you should be needing to do on first launch if you want to just use the tool? Absolutely
The biggest issue I remember I had was with Vorta, a GUI for borg. Which also just had massive filesystem issues (plus some settings saving issues, which I assume also is a FS issue). Having problems reading your filesystem is quite a problem when you want to use a tool that, well, needs to read your filesystem.
I’m honestly not really interested in stacking a pile of tools up that just didn’t work for me.
If you like flatpack, go ahead. More power to the people who do.
It’s just not a tool that I had any luck with. And I don’t really see a point in trying again for the forseeable future
Interesting. I use an immutable distro (Fedora Kinoite) so basically everything I use outside of the apps bundled with the OS are flatpaks. Other than learning a few things about FlatPak permissions, file locations, etc, it’s been completely painless.
What I experienced is that Snaps/Flatpaks that contain X11 apps will behave very oddly in a Wayland sessions, at least with NVidia GPUs.
Using distros that still use X11, like Linux Mint, seems to help a lot.
One thing I will commend Snaps/Flatpak for however is bundling dependencies, especially deprecated ones. I spent DAYS trying to install an older version of .NET framework that’s no longer supported to get a game (Vintage Story), but to no avail. With the appropriate Snap/Flatpak it worked first try, well, once I found the distro that doesn’t have the X11 problem that was previously stated.
Yeah, I do know about that. (You’re referring to the PPA repo thing, yeah?) But there are a couple of reasons why that isn’t a workable solution specifically for me specifically.
The major reason is that I only use Ubuntu on my work machine and my employer’s compliance department won’t really answer questions about whether it’s allowed to add extra repositories or install things not from the official Ubuntu repositories on company-owned hardware. (And they’re always really threatening and assholeish about breaking the rules they won’t elaborate on, so my best option is kindof just to interpret the rules as strictly as I can and follow that. Or else flout the rules and dare them to fire me. Heh…) Raising questions like that is always a whole thing.
“firefox” from the PPA repo and “firefox” from Snap have the same package name which makes things awkward dealing with Apt. (Unless you use “firefox-esr” from the PPA repo, which would otherwise be an acceptable workaround if that was the only issue.)
So I just use Chrome on my work machine. I dislike Chrome more than Firefox for many reasons, but I at least mitigate some of the issues with Chrome by specifically not doing anything personal on my work machine. I don’t really care if Chrome invades my employer’s privacy. Especially when my employer doesn’t give me a choice in browsers. If anything comes of it, it’s their own damned fault.
For the conflicting package names, there is at least the solution to pin the sources.list from the PPA with a higher priority than the official Ubuntu repository. This would work even package-wise.
Ubuntu forks that ditch snap > Ubuntu
I wouldn’t even mind snap so much but the day I found out apt would automatically use snaps instead for some packages with no easy opt out was a step too far.
Drop it, snaps are dead. All hail FlatPak.
Try using flatpak for command-line software, I dare you
I despise flatpak and snap equally
Not a single time have I used a program with them that worked properly
You’ve been very unlucky. There’s plenty of properly working flatpaks.
lol what are you talking about? One of my daily drivers is Kinoite and it works great. What flatpaks are you having issues with? Frankly, you must be being hyperbolic, because tons of people use tons of flatpaks without issue.
I mean, it’s great that it works for you.
But I’m not even kidding. Literally every single one.
I’ve now completely purged all snap and fp apps from my system and live a less angry life
Again: name them. Describe the failures.
I simply don’t believe that you have 100% incompatibility, and I say that because I use a decently broad selection across several devices without any serious issues. Sure, they’re not perfect, but they’re a damn sight better than snaps, and in my experience, decently reliable.
Back your claims with data, or be prepared to have people like me call bullshit.
I mean I find it hard to believe but this level of argumentativeness is silly and toxic. Why would they lie? Maybe they have some edge case or misconfiguration. Maybe they got unlucky and ran into some kind of breaking bug on their specific system. Shit happens.
I’ve stopped using them for over a year now.
Granted, most of the apps I used were snap based, but some of them were flatpack.
Most of them were single-use “use this tool with flatpack” tools via github, so I really can’t remember what those were when they just didn’t work.
The ones I looked into why it didn’t work were always some filesystem permission stuff. Configurable? Sure. Not something you should be needing to do on first launch if you want to just use the tool? Absolutely
The biggest issue I remember I had was with Vorta, a GUI for borg. Which also just had massive filesystem issues (plus some settings saving issues, which I assume also is a FS issue). Having problems reading your filesystem is quite a problem when you want to use a tool that, well, needs to read your filesystem.
I’m honestly not really interested in stacking a pile of tools up that just didn’t work for me.
If you like flatpack, go ahead. More power to the people who do.
It’s just not a tool that I had any luck with. And I don’t really see a point in trying again for the forseeable future
Interesting. I use an immutable distro (Fedora Kinoite) so basically everything I use outside of the apps bundled with the OS are flatpaks. Other than learning a few things about FlatPak permissions, file locations, etc, it’s been completely painless.
What I experienced is that Snaps/Flatpaks that contain X11 apps will behave very oddly in a Wayland sessions, at least with NVidia GPUs.
Using distros that still use X11, like Linux Mint, seems to help a lot.
One thing I will commend Snaps/Flatpak for however is bundling dependencies, especially deprecated ones. I spent DAYS trying to install an older version of .NET framework that’s no longer supported to get a game (Vintage Story), but to no avail. With the appropriate Snap/Flatpak it worked first try, well, once I found the distro that doesn’t have the X11 problem that was previously stated.
Yeah, why does Ubuntu keep snap?
Like, WTF is the deal with not having any official way to install Firefox other than snap? Firefox.
Because canonical, who make ubuntu, also make snap. So it gets shoved down your throat. This is why I don’t use Ubuntu.
Fyi, Mozilla released an official apt package a couple months ago to get Firefox without snap
Yeah, I do know about that. (You’re referring to the PPA repo thing, yeah?) But there are a couple of reasons why that isn’t a workable solution specifically for me specifically.
So I just use Chrome on my work machine. I dislike Chrome more than Firefox for many reasons, but I at least mitigate some of the issues with Chrome by specifically not doing anything personal on my work machine. I don’t really care if Chrome invades my employer’s privacy. Especially when my employer doesn’t give me a choice in browsers. If anything comes of it, it’s their own damned fault.
For the conflicting package names, there is at least the solution to pin the sources.list from the PPA with a higher priority than the official Ubuntu repository. This would work even package-wise.
No they actually have a real apt repo now.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-firefox-linux#w_install-firefox-deb-package-for-debian-based-distributions-recommended
This is coming from the same company that put Amazon ads on the dash