Snap, Flatpak or App image what are their pros and cons?
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All of them have more or less the same goals: contained applications that can be packaged once and deployed everywhere.
What are the pros and cons of each? What is your opinion about them?
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@scottalanmiller can you please move this to IT discussion, I chose the wrong category when creating the post.
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@Romo said in Snap, Flatpack or App image what are their pros and cons?:
@scottalanmiller can you please move this to IT discussion, I chose the wrong category when creating the post.
Moved
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@gjacobse thank you
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I haven't messed with them yet. It seems like we are going to be in the same situation with apt and dnf. We could have already had a universal package management system.
Also from what I've read Flatpack needs dbus and a systemd --user instance so its not for servers.
The isolation idea is awesome. It's better than spinning up an LXC container for one app, but from what I've heard (not a lot and could be 100% wrong) they just aren't there yet.
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Of them Snaps seems to have the most attention and having only worked with it, it seems great. I used snaps for spinning up Rocket.Chat and it was great how well it works.
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I want to clarify. When I say they just aren't there yet, I mean they aren't there as the cross platform solution. They do awesome stuff, but I don't think we have a clear cross platform solution yet.
Snap "works" in Fedora, but requires setting SELinux to permissive, so I'm not sure if that counts as working.
Flatpack only works with GUIs.
I don't know anything about AppImage but from what I've seen it's easier to run, but less isolating (secure).
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@stacksofplates said in Snap, Flatpack or App image what are their pros and cons?:
I want to clarify. When I say they just aren't there yet, I mean they aren't there as the cross platform solution. They do awesome stuff, but I don't think we have a clear cross platform solution yet.
Snap "works" in Fedora, but requires setting SELinux to permissive, so I'm not sure if that counts as working.
Flatpack only works with GUIs.
I don't know anything about AppImage but from what I've seen it's easier to run, but less isolating (secure).
I'm not sure how much of the goal(s) are security versus just replacing traditional linked dependency deployments with self contained ones.
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@scottalanmiller said in Snap, Flatpack or App image what are their pros and cons?:
@stacksofplates said in Snap, Flatpack or App image what are their pros and cons?:
I want to clarify. When I say they just aren't there yet, I mean they aren't there as the cross platform solution. They do awesome stuff, but I don't think we have a clear cross platform solution yet.
Snap "works" in Fedora, but requires setting SELinux to permissive, so I'm not sure if that counts as working.
Flatpack only works with GUIs.
I don't know anything about AppImage but from what I've seen it's easier to run, but less isolating (secure).
I'm not sure how much of the goal(s) are security versus just replacing traditional linked dependency deployments with self contained ones.
They really tout it as a big thing. The first page on the Snap website has a whole section dedicated to Snaps being read only with dedicated storage for more security.
Flatpak also mentions it in a called out section on their site. (Realized I was spelling it wrong ha.)
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@stacksofplates said in Snap, Flatpak or App image what are their pros and cons?:
@scottalanmiller said in Snap, Flatpack or App image what are their pros and cons?:
@stacksofplates said in Snap, Flatpack or App image what are their pros and cons?:
I want to clarify. When I say they just aren't there yet, I mean they aren't there as the cross platform solution. They do awesome stuff, but I don't think we have a clear cross platform solution yet.
Snap "works" in Fedora, but requires setting SELinux to permissive, so I'm not sure if that counts as working.
Flatpack only works with GUIs.
I don't know anything about AppImage but from what I've seen it's easier to run, but less isolating (secure).
I'm not sure how much of the goal(s) are security versus just replacing traditional linked dependency deployments with self contained ones.
They really tout it as a big thing. The first page on the Snap website has a whole section dedicated to Snaps being read only with dedicated storage for more security.
Flatpak also mentions it in a called out section on their site. (Realized I was spelling it wrong ha.)
True, they do mention it a bit. Seems like such an odd thing for them to care about. I mean, it's nice that they make part of it read only but... who cares? The big deal is the packaging. All the rest is just distraction.
