What's your opinion on Snap/Flatpak, and why?

IUsedTo@lemmy.world to Linux@lemmy.ml – 39 points –

I know snap is fairly unpopular in the Linux community, and I've seen mixed responses regarding Flatpak. I wanted to know, what's the general opinion of people in this community regarding this 2 package managers?

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To quickly introduce myself, I'm the main author of Paperwork. I've packaged Paperwork in various ways, and many people have packaged it in various distributions as well.

I'm fine with Flatpak. In my opinion, it has its use cases. I find complementary to other existing methods (distribution packages, AppImage, ...)

However I'm not fine with Snap. I haven't used it much, but my understanding is that it focuses on Canonical servers. You can change its configuration to use other servers, but it defaults to Canonical servers (and we all know most users will never change default settings). To me, this is a slipping slope towards proprietary services/software.

Moreover, I'm really annoyed by Canonical pushing Snap by default in Ubuntu (Firefox, Chrome, etc are packaged only using Snap now; the APT packages install the Snap packages). It doesn't bring anything to the users. Those packages could have been as well-packaged using APT (see the repositories *-updates in Debian for instance).

PS: nice software your Paperwork. I hope in the future you'll add support for djvu format – most of my documents are in that format (it saves a lot of memory for scanned documents, compared to pdf).

That's something I would like to do someday. Unfortunately, last time I checked, libraries for reading DjVu files exist and are OK, but not for writing them. Last time I checked, most programs I found that write DjVu files actually don't use the DjVuLibre library. They actually run the DjVuLibre commands.

Great that it's in the todo-list anyway. I usually use the Any2DjVu server for converting and OCR-ing documents in pdf format. The djvu file is typically 20% size of the original pdf, and the OCR is usually better too. I'll check on your project regularly for updates :)