Reply to post: Ugh

Ugh

Snap. Ugh. 1) It starts pulling down huge updates whenever it feels like it, even if you are on a low-speed connection. Forced updates and no way to hold back an update. 2) The bigger problem, the few I tried were broken -- the attempt to sandbox one kept it from being able to access my home directory... then after I persuaded it to do that it could literally open files from my home directory, but nowhere else (I want to load a file from a USB stick or something? Too bad!) Another was supposed to use OpenGL but was unable to successfully do so. And this was Snaps (made by Canonical) on Ubuntu (made by Canonical), so forget using it on some other distro if it's that screwy on the primary distro.

FlatPak? Sounds like, from a practical matter, it's essentially running a parallel package manager -- the FlatPak depends on other FlatPaks to provide base libs. I saw it pointed out that you may already have Gnome, but you install one copy of Gimp and it install's another copy of Gnome using Fedora's FlatPaks; another package will install ANOTHER copy of Gnome using freedesktop.org's FlatPaks. I mean, if it works maybe that's OK but it sounds like it could get a bit out of control pretty easily.

I ran an app or two as an AppImage, and that actually did work OK. They don't get cutesy with sandboxing, just blob up the libs and junk into a .AppImage file. To be honest the only one I've tried is rpcs3 (PS3 emulator), but it acts just like a "portable" Windows app... you download it, you run it, and it works. If you want a newer version, download the newer .AppImage and run that instead. But I've seen plenty of complaints about this format too, since just like FlatPak and Snap it's including libs that are already on your system,. Primary complaint being apps that should match your desktop theme may not since the AppImage will be looking for whatever theme it may have within the AppImage file itself.

I've also heard these are all a bit of a PITA to package, to the point that some people "drank the Koolaid" and thought they should definitely ship an AppImage, FlatPak, or Snap, but could not sort out how to get their package to do so. Apparently this is not a terribly easy process.