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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Flatpack, appimage, snaps.. (leminal.space)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Appimage for me ticks all the boxes for cross distro package as its very portable, simple to run, what are devs trying to do when creating snaps and flatpack?

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[–] [email protected] 74 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Software deployment that tackles dependency hell in a secure fashion while providing repeatable, atomic updates and rollback.

AppImage doesn't even provide a proper update system.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can you elaborate on update system? AppImage is just a format, right? Whereas flatpak is a format and an entire toolkit for downloading and running flatpaks.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You already said it. Flatpak and Snap both include an entire system around updates and rollback which provide some pretty strong guarantees for update success. AppImage does not. It's got some libs available that an individual developer could use to implement their own update mechanism but isn't a built-in. And besides, without a system-level component that manages install/update/rollback, you can't have any guarantees about the update process. You're back to the Windows-world per-app update.exe paradigm (or update.sh in Linux).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

There's software for that. Honestly, i prefer that over the 'whole package or nothing' approach in Flatpack, which still has ~/.var for packages hardcoded btw.