If you have all the AppArmor patches and use a custom snap store, I believe so. There’s some inefficiencies with flatpak that are currently ignored. For example, every flatpak app has its own bubblewrap processing running, though they are light on resource usage. However, inter process communication is really inefficient, there’s a lot of context switching. You have the app talking to the dbus proxy and the proxy talks the real dbus (there might even be a step between the dbus proxy and real dbus).

Meanwhile, for snap, this security stuff is handled by AppArmor security profiles. There’s no need for a dbus proxy.

That’s part of what I mean. Snap could be so much more interesting and useful if not for Canonical doing stuff like only allowing one store and slacking on proper support for non-AppArmor distros.

One of the more bizarre experiences I’ve had is that a Canonical employee packaged a version of a Minecraft launcher. It was absolutely garbage, didn’t even start. The first thing that comes to mind is that snap is just garbage. But for fun, I made my own package of it, and it just worked perfectly. Which just leaves me the question of why a Canonical employee who works on snap can’t create a good snap package.

There’s also the weird fact that Ubuntu dropped the ball with its core24 runtime. For some reason, Canonical’s own snaps stuck to core22 up until this month. Like, why wouldn’t they upgrade to their latest runtime? If there was an issue with it, why has it been broken for 2 years? Doesn’t inspire trust.

I can understand MIT being an issue in some cases. For example, VSCode is a proprietary fork of the MIT open-source Code. If Microsoft wanted, they could stop publishing the MIT open source version. Of course that code would still exist as MIT, but development would slow down without Microsoft.

But I don’t see uutils being MIT as an issue. It’s primary goal is to be compatible with GNU coreutils. You can’t really rug pull a project with a goal like that. And permissively licensed utils have been around thanks to BSD and it’s never been an issue. You don’t see companies like Apple using proprietary forked versions as benefit. The “value” they add is higher up the tech stack with their own truly proprietary stuff or open stuff that encourages lock-in to its ecosystem, like Swift.

Snap as a technology is so interesting and more versatile than other formats. It’s just unfortunate that Canonical is in charge of the project, they’ve made some baffling decisions and continue to shoot themselves in the foot.

Haven’t done it personally, but I think Ubuntu would be one of the better choices. You get the Ubuntu ARM debs and ARM snaps out of the box.

You can then install Flathub and Fedora Flatpaks.

Fedora Flatapks is small and not without controversy, but one of its benefits is that all of its packages are built for ARM. Flathub and Snap aren’t consistent in doing that. Any many times you’ll find that Snap has an ARM build and Flathub doesn’t, and vice versa.

It certainly has it’s issues. Takes up quite a bit of space since each app tends ships its own copy of electron (though distros like Arch do try to make apps share a single Electron build). Apps may ship out of date versions that may have security vulnerabilities, though it’s not always the end of the world since they tend not to access outside of their own domains. As for slowness and resource usages, it’s bit of a tricky subject; an Electron app can be optimized, but will always use quite a bit of RAM.

Though undeniably they have been beneficial for Linux if only because it allows some companies to support Linux without too much extra work.

SSD is still supported, just tested Spotify and Flathub’s Electron test app in a VM with Plasma.

That’s misleading, there was a significant outlier. Gnome was on average slower, but not that much slower.

And with community maintained distros like Debian and Fedora, you kinda get the best of both worlds. You have a mostly community distro that doesn’t have corporate interests pushed on it, but have a corporation paying developers to work on it because it’s in their interest to.

Though unlike Gnome Web, this the performance is actually good despite being an early beta.

The scrolling performance using a mouse in Gnome Web just sucks, it’s choppy and inconsistent. Though it does feel okay when using a touchpad.

I’m looking through Gear Lever and don’t see anything. I only see the option to change the path where there actual Appimages are stored, not the data created by the appimages.

I see two options.

The simpler of which is to have a wrapper script that says HOME=/custom/path/for/appimage. Apps that correctly follow xdg-specs will then put all their data in that path. But not all apps will. Apps that put stuff in /home/$USER will not use the correct location.

The more foolproof way would be using something like bubblewrap, which is used by flatpak. With bubblewrap, the sandboxing can make /home/$USER appear as /custom/path/for/appimage. However, this would take more work to setup, since I presume you want the appimages to feel unsandboxed.

That doesn’t solve the issue of keeping data in a specified directory.

MacOS is UNIX, but is not the best implementation of UNIX.

The UNIX tools it ships are extremely old. For example, it comes with GNU Screen, which I was using but was having same strange issues with. It turned out it uses a version from 2006… so I had to brew install a modern version.

And I’m personally not the biggest fan of MacOS. It’s certainly better than Windows thanks to Apple mostly treating the user with basic respect (no ads), but the desktop/window manager is just super quirky. No other desktop, whether it be Windows or any desktop on Linux behaves quite like it. They tend to only adopt the nicer features while keeping a UX that feels closer to Windows. For example, MacOS quirky/unique in doing

• Requiring a click to activate a window (with no option to change this behavior)
• Fullscreening a window moves it to its own space
• Closing an app’s window does not close the app itself for the majority of apps
  • Perhaps not the biggest deal if the goal is app startup speed for heavily used apps, but unnecessary for rarely used apps and clutters the dock)
  • Also can be quite annoying since it will drag you to the last space you used the app on
• Minimized windows show on dock as previews
  • Not that of an idea, but strange since you now have two ways to bring the app back: clicking on the app icon itself or the minimized preview

Flatpak cannot access the host GPU drivers, so there are runtimes for NVIDIA drivers.

What they are referring to is that the driver version on the host must match the driver version installed as a flatpak runtime. Otherwise, you may get graphical issues and crashes.

Packagekit mainly.

It also helps if you just focus on a single package format. The Snap Store’s performance is great, though I have seen some baffling QA issues with it (like categories showing up like “Devel…”). There’s also that store that Universal Blue is pushing, forget what it’s called.

It doesn’t work better or worse on Ubuntu. The fact it (partially) uses Ubuntu libraries matters very little given that the libraries are 14 years old… But I think the client now mostly relies on Debian 12 libraries to run since a year or two ago.

In this case, the DE is the main cause of issue, not the distro base.

That was a combination of the Steam client being a piece of trash (incredible complexity and technical debt*) and COSMIC. COSMIC is quite buggy when it comes to Xwayland. I’ve had plenty of issues where I close a Xwayland window, but a ghost of the window remains.

• the Steam Client runs on a combination of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and Debian 12 libraries. It has a combination of their old VGUI code and newer Chromium GUI. It remains 32-bit and only supports X11.

That’s unlikely. It’s far more likely that they are at the top simply because they are more popular.

The only exception to this rule is the higher end 13th/14th gen Intel chips, which really do have a crashing problem.

It’s right. While Fedora is a community project, Red Hat does hold a special place in it as its corporate sponsor. For example, the Fedora Project Leader position must be held by a Red Hat employee.