Snap...

Yo dawg, I herd you like containers so I put snap in yo flatpak, so that u can sandbox in your sandbox

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, same here, that's why I specified that they're only nice when they work. Often they just don't work, so Flatpak is better.

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.

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.

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

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.

I remember those times too. The difference today is that there are so many more libraries and projects use those libraries a lot more often.

So using configure and make means that the user also has the responsibility of ensuring all those libraries are up to date. Which again if we're talking about not using binary install, each also need a regular configure/make process too. It's not that unusual for large packages to have dependencies on 100+ libraries. At which point building and maintaining the build for all of them yourself becomes untenable really. However I think gentoo exists to automate a lot of this while still building from source.

I understand why binaries with references to other binary packages for prerequisites are used. I also understand where the limits of this are and why the AppImage/Flatpak/snaps exist. I just don't particularly like the latter as a concept. But accept there's times you might need them.

obligatory "there is always a relevant xkcd"

Nothing useful for me. Given the choice I will usually pick the flatpak.

Better cli experience and the permission prompts are two that come to mind.

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.