A bit of history. The first universal packaging format was snap by Canonical and used to be called Click apps and it was made for the Ubuntu mobile OS and later to the Ubuntu desktop. Red Hat in response to that created the FlatPak format. The AppImages are community effort.
AppImages long predate Snaps, but yes, Snaps do predate Flatpaks by a few months. There's also Nix packages, which predate all three. Of course, this all matters very little compared to the merits of all four technologies. The heavy dependence on proprietary technology for repositories makes Snap clearly unsuitable to become the universal Linux package format.
I don't think that matters at this point. Flatpak is widespread and Canonical can't possibly expect the linux crowd to choose the proprietary alternative. I could see snap being the one, had they just handled it differently.
A bit of history. The first universal packaging format was snap by Canonical and used to be called Click apps and it was made for the Ubuntu mobile OS and later to the Ubuntu desktop. Red Hat in response to that created the FlatPak format. The AppImages are community effort.
AppImages long predate Snaps, but yes, Snaps do predate Flatpaks by a few months. There's also Nix packages, which predate all three. Of course, this all matters very little compared to the merits of all four technologies. The heavy dependence on proprietary technology for repositories makes Snap clearly unsuitable to become the universal Linux package format.
I don't think that matters at this point. Flatpak is widespread and Canonical can't possibly expect the linux crowd to choose the proprietary alternative. I could see snap being the one, had they just handled it differently.