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In my experience, snaps are better for servers, and flatpaks are better for desktops.

I haven’t used snaps for a couple years, so they may have fixed this, but I’ve found flatpaks have less issues interacting with peripherals that aren’t mice/keyboards without fenagling with app permissions. A number of snap apps just wouldn’t work without disabling containment entirely (aka “classic”).

Flatpak permissions can be manipulated from system settings in Plasma, and there’s also Flatseal. I am not aware of an equivalent for snaps; doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, I haven’t kept up with what’s available for snap for some time.

I like having options, but I wished they were better. Snap has been nothing but trouble for me, I had Authy break on me for weeks until I found that it couldn’t handle a symlink in my home directory. Flatpaks just take forever to install and update, and it sucks that there’s weird sharp edges around flatpaks permissions that cause some apps to break. App Image have been pretty okay, especially when you have that integrator tool, just would be nice if they could update themselves.

IDK. I kinda miss PPAs being the norm.

I like Snaps on my server, not on my desktop. Flatpaks are fine. I use them for stuff I wouldn’t compile myself anyway (mainly proprietary binaries) but I prefer compiling my own packages where I can.

Flatpak is fantastic. I think containerization is definitely the future of Linux app distribution, because the security and portability are so much better than native packages. Flatpak is the best implementation of this concept IMO, because it has a robust permission management system, is completely open unlike snap, and is performant with fast load times, solid deduplication of dependencies, and no garbage loopback devices

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Flatpak’s the only one I’ve had good experiences with. Tangentially related, but I especially dislike AppImages. I’m not a fan of how bulky installing various flatpaks ends up being and use native packages or the AUR usually, but beyond that they’re really convenient for non-critical applications that otherwise would mesh poorly with my distro or aren’t available there. Friend of mine tells me it’s also a nice system to package Windows applications/games with a preconfigured Wine version.

Flatpak made my life much easier. It solves so many problems that the Linux ecosystem had. “Package once, use everywhere” is great.

Snap could have been similarly good, but I think Canonical made some mistakes.

I don’t hate Snap. I think a bit of friendly competition is good for both Snap and Flatpak.

Snaps still don’t seem to have network storage permissions when I tried ubuntu a week ago, so they suck for me. I put just about everything on my NFS.

A lot of the flatpaks for programs I actually use are third party and not maintained by the actual developer, have missing or enweirdened features because of the sandboxing, and are a removed to run from command line. So I try to avoid those too.

I use both on gentoo for some obscure or proprietary stuff that is not packaged in portage, like filebot, authy desktop, discord, steam and foobar2000 (including wine in 1 bundle to avoid dependencies and switching all portage packages to 32bit abi). It works well and opens me up to loads of stuff. It’s freedom in some way.

Snap or flatpak makes no difference to me, they’re just different backends for kde discover

Thanks to Flatpak, I can have basically careless OS updates with Fedora Silverblue, so I’m very happy with them. I also appreciate the fact that every distro that can run Flatpak automatically has a wide range of software available to it.

I’m sure Snaps have similar advantages, but I haven’t worked with them much. I don’t really like that you can only publish Snaps through Canonical though, so in that sense I hope Flatpak wins.

On a distro like Fedora that doesn’t ship non-free codecs, flatpaks makes it a lot simpler. So I really like it for stuff like Firefox and media players.

I always prefer native packages over containerized. But I’m glad they exist, because every now and then a native package won’t work. I don’t agree with most people that say Linux needs to be streamlined: less distros, less packaging systems, etc. Personally, I like when I have options. I prefer flatpak over snaps and appimages, but ideally I’d like to have all of them available just in case. When comparing snaps to flatpaks, in my personal experience, flatpaks just integrate better. But they’re not THAT much better than snaps, so I could see myself using either, it’s just that so far I haven’t run into a situation where I’d need to use a snap. There is one downside to flatpaks though, and it’s their names. As DT pointed out in his video, it can be pretty annoying to run them through terminal. But I hate the fact that Mint removed snap and Ubuntu removed flatpaks. I don’t think we’re achieving anything with this “war of formats”. Let people use both and decide for themselves.

First of all, I think an idea of package management separated from a system environment is generally good for desktop usage. And don’t like and the idea to place all existing application software in distro repositories. But implementations are far from ideal. So I list those bellow from worse to better.

1. AppImage. It highly relies on the environment doesn’t have native sandboxing, and promotes bad practices like building apps with old libraries.

2. Snap. Snap is mostly fine but relies only on AppArmor for confinement, has performance issues for a long time without significant progress. It promotes a proprietary app store. Relies on Ubuntu infrastructure. Good: snap store support signed packages and more friendly to developers.

3. Flatpak. App start time is near to native. It has stronger sanboxing but with many holes for compatibility. It true distro-independent as well as popular runtimes are also distro-independent. Bad: Flathub doesn’t support signed applications. Sandboxing and permissions rely on hacks and tricks which are far from good design. Development is slow but it is true for the mentioned above as well.

With that, I am more open to new alternatives, especially if started from a system point of view rather than from a position of distro-independent package managers like Google did with Android. For example, sandboxing can rely on users separation and work on various operating systems not only with Linux kernel.

My first experience with snap was rather frustrating.

The application kept failing to read the config file I provided without telling me why. After reading up it turns out snap can only read from the users home directory (and mounts, I think).

Fine, frustrating but I vaguely understand it. So I move my config to the home directory. Still the same issue with no explanation.

Finally it turns out it can’t read dot files or dot directories even inside the home directory.

Again, that’s understandable but it was an incredibly frustrating, unintuitive experience. Vastly different than the Linux experience I was accustomed to.