#Flatpak isn’t the future. It’s the present. If you’re not already building for and around Flatpak, you’re behind. It’s already mainstream, it’s already successful. Where have you been?
For reference, @elementary was investigating Snap and Flatpak in 2016 and committed to supporting Flatpak in 2019. We re-launched AppCenter as a Flatpak store in 2021. We’ve been shipping several of our own first party apps in elementary OS as Flatpak for 2 years now.
As a distro, we’ve been able to ship the latest versions of the few GNOME apps we package without having to wait for the Ubuntu updates cycle. As a DE, the filechooser portal meant we could have our own file picker dialog without janky patches to GTK. As a platform, developers writing for AppCenter can now reach any distro. And along the way users have gotten more control, more privacy, more security with every step
@danirabbit I am an end user and I cannot review the technical details re packages. But so far, my user preference order (I use Mint and some Debian) is 1) .deb 2) AppImage 3) Flatpak and 4) Snap. Flatpak is now much better integrated into Mint software manager, so maybe I would choose it instead of AppImage. What is your view of AppImage? I think it was my first FlatPak istallation that disappointed me so much; it was so old and managed by non-related, later release with deb from developer.
@hehemrin AppImage should be avoided at all costs. It should have faded to obscurity 10 years ago. It should be forgotten.
@danirabbit Aha, oki, thanks. Anyway, it's really alive. From user perspective, it works well. But from security, maintainer, developer and maybe more perspectives I do not have the knowledge you have.
@danirabbit I read this forum post re why the Vivaldi browser is not available as Flatpak from the developer. If you have time and whant to, what is your comment with your far deeper knowledge than I have into Flatpak? https://forum.vivaldi.net/post/669805
@hehemrin @danirabbit we have the occasional person come in who still doesn't have Internet at home and AppImages have come in handy... But it's a small number...
@hehemrin It’s basically the worst of all worlds. The problem is the main developer doesn’t care about making a good packaging format, he cares about making a format that behaves exactly the same as the first version of Mac OS X. It’s designed intentionally to ignore the last 20 years of computing. It’s like regressivism as a packaging format