Snap...

I've had bad experiences with AppImages. For universal format they do a really poor job at that. And it's a huge step back into Windows direction that you'll have to manually download, update etc your shit. Makes managing a bunch of apps a pain.
- The thing with appimages is that they expect the developer to have full knowledge of what libraries need to be bundled with their app, which makes it difficult to make truly universal appimages. In flatpak you just select one of a set list of runtimes and add any additional dependencies on top of it. Flatpak also re-uses the files for each runtime in between the different apps that use it, which saves a lot of disk space.
- But isn't appimage the closest one to the app-system from Android? Since things could be really different on many clients an "app-container" is the best solution.
  Why not containerise everything? You need libreoffice? No problem, here is a docker or podman container.
  BTW. I like flatpak, too. It's the most stable, but I never understand it's mechanics. There is always another pack installed, freecode, gtk, qt whatever. Even if the system has already the correct gtk version, nope, the dev decided to use the gtk image from Ubuntu.
Auto-updates are a hell-no for me.
There was a perfectly good user interface for updates. Then Ubuntu decides "wait.. What if we made updates compulsory and effectively random and skipped the UI. The user can do system updates whenever they want, because those don't matter for security or something, but these apps must be updated whenever snap determines they must."
Oh, snap!
- Oh come on, mesa is only (checks) 112 megabytes!
  you know what, carry on!

Fun fact: there used to be an Authy flatpak that just installed the snap inside

Oh, what the fuck!?
TBH I wouldn't mind it that much. The whole point of flatpak is that the developer can do whatever demented satanic rituals they want inside of the sandbox, and it won't contaminate the rest of the system.
- Yo dawg, I herd you like containers so I put snap in yo flatpak, so that u can sandbox in your sandbox
- Flatpak has long had the ability to dump the contents of a snap into it, because snaps had already solved many of the build issues flatpaks were struggling with and they used similar runtimes for their sandboxing. It's also a convenient way to convert apps over, since many apps got packaged as snaps before flatpak was really usable.

Ente Auth > Authy

Yep. I'm selfhosting it now. Works great but selfhosting isn't straightforward yet, still the best Authy/Google/Microsoft Authenticator drop in replacement with sync.
- Is self hosting even worth it for auth? I self-host ente Photos myself, because that way I don't need to pay for a subscription, but auth is free anyway, and the backups are entirely e2ee, right?
Yeah, I mean the snap app shown above is being deprecated so there's not even a choice. If you're using Authy on PC you have to switch.

Just use Ente instead.

2FAuth. On the web so you can check it anywhere you want and supports passkeys.

How about https://2fas.com/?

Or just use Keysmith and import your keys there.

Once you discover you can just install the nix package manager with one command and then install everything with another, snap is out of the game. Even if you just use nix for like 2 packages, it's already much better

If you really need that software couldn't you just use the Windows version?

Guys they’re doing a bit.

Unpopular opinion: snap is not so bad and genuinely useful for many things

I would rather have a snap than building from source or use some tar.gz archive with a sketchy install script

I would rather have a snap than building from source or use some tar.gz archive with a sketchy install script
I agree, but that sounds like false dichotomy to me because snap competes with flatpak.
- I never presented this as a dichotomy. You know, people prefer things in a certain order, right? I prefer Flatpaks and native packages over snaps and I prefer snaps to building from source.
- There are plenty of use cases that snap provides that flatpak doesn't - they only compete in a subset of snap's functionality. For example, flatpak does not (and is not designed to) provide a way to use it to distribute kernels or system services.
some tar.gz archive with a sketchy install script
I just can't... like I'm old and that's wh I still can't wrap my head around how we went full circle from "./configure && make & make install scripts are almost the de facto way to install software in linux" to "a sketchy install script". We're living interesting times at Linux
- Blame the thousands of supply chain attacks.
- Last time I ran a corporate-made installer, it caused massive graphical glitches and lock-ups after waking from sleep. It basically gave my system computer-AIDS.
  That's why I never run scripts which are too long for me to easily understand outside a sandbox. Official distro repositories and Flatpaks are the only sources I have some level of trust in.
- In a job interview I asked a CIS grad what the steps are to compile something on the command line and they had no clue. If it’s not “sudo apt install” they are lost.
- yeah idk a multi thousand line configure script seems sketchy to me, like what happened with xz
Very unpopular
I would prefer manually writing each software using butterflies over having snapd installed on my system.
- obligatory "there is always a relevant xkcd"
And what do they offer over flatpak?
- Better cli experience and the permission prompts are two that come to mind.
- Nothing useful for me. Given the choice I will usually pick the flatpak.
🫣
snap would be better then installing from manual archives, but it's comparisons are actually to your distro's package manager and flatpak.
I'd rather be able to use my web browser uninterrupted without it being updated while using it and be forced to restart it.
- The updates download in the background and will install when you exit the snapped app. If you really don't want automatic updates, you can run snap refresh --hold to hold all automatic updates or add a snap name to hold updates for that snap.