What's your guys opinion on snap, as a replacement for apt. It's starting to get to the point...

Okay fair enough, let me rephrase that question. How what is the ratio of Linux users who are using something Debian or Ubuntu based vs all of the other distros exclusively supported by Flatpak. My point is, yes Flatpak may support Arch, Gentoo, and Void, but that's a very minuscule userbase.

*What is the ratio

>My point is, yes Flatpak may support Arch, Gentoo, and Void, but that's a very minuscule userbase.
By headcount they're smaller, but they have a large impact of the adoption of standards. Recall projects like Mir and Upstart: Ubuntu might have a big userbase but they (Canonical) can't push a standard to save their life.

I do not know of Upstart. Mir was obnoxious because a display protocol is a very fundamental component. Snappy and Flatpak are much higher level, and I don't think Canonical's past mistakes determine their progress. Maybe it's just because I'm an Ubuntu user, but when I'm searching for programs on the internet, Snap shows up a lot more than Flatpak.

Cont'd I honestly didn't know of Flatpak either, but again that's just me haha.

it will end like upstart vs systemd. Ubuntu can create the hype but always lose in the implementation of their own ideas.

the three big contenders are Flatpak, Snappy and AppImage.

AppImage is convenient but it's not distributed. Flatpak is older but never got enough attention until Snappy appeared.

>Flatpak is older but never got enough attention
Personally, I'm amazed Flatpak has gotten as far as it has, given there's no graphical interface and the CLI tool is frustratingly designed. Who the hell thought referring to programs by typing a reversed domain name was a good idea?
I'm half-temped to try building a crappy GUI for it myself.

I personally expect a Linux application work first as a cli software and then create a graphical frontend. But that's my preference, I never understand GUI for package managers, Synaptic was buggy when I first used Linux so many years ago, so I guess it was more for convenience I began using console commands.

>I personally expect a Linux application work first as a cli software and then create a graphical frontend.
That's fine when the CLI interface is well designed, but Flatpak's interface is downright painful.

It won't replace native packages. It will live alongside them.

This. Flatpak is superior. There's no reason for snap to exist.

Why not just use AppImage? In my opinion, it's easier to manage and much more straightforward for the end user.

It's easy to do, but it has two major issues. Updating and dependency sharing.
Updating requires building a custom updater within the app so using repositories would be impossible, you can still make an appimage repository but in that case updating requires downloading the entire program all over again, which for anything large like browsers, IDEs and office suites means hundreds of MB per program downloaded. Using many appimages would mean gigabytes of bandwidth wasted instead of just a couple hundred MB.
Dependencies are not shared between appimages, which means you'll have significantly more disk space wasted than you would when using flatpaks and snaps.

It's distributing statically linked garbage to your distro of choice, meaning no updates ever if the maintainer decides not to provide them and importing the update hell that is windows to your gnu/linux distro of choice. It's mostly shilled by corporations that try to get an easier way of pushing their locked down garbage on your machine while avoiding your distros package maintainers. I'm conclusion, it's an amazing thing if you love not being in control and if you think a gazillion programs with outdated dependencies like on windows are a good thing.

replacing official repos with trusted maintainers by third-parties with different interests is NOT a good idea.
It has the potential to literally bring windows-like malwares right into your OS because there will be no control over whatever is in your snap package.
Universal package manager might be a good idea but the snap way is a security nightmare.

*snap*

I don't really get what you're asking. Are there any major distributions that don't support both snap and flatpack?

>Dependency management hasn't been a issue on any major distro in DECADES.
lol
It's become such an issue for me whenever I use anything except Debian that I just recompile everything from scratch.

Please just go back to windows or wherever you came from