Because you can package and deploy OS components with it. As a result you can build an OS with it, do foolproof updates of it and …gulp, happy tear… rollbackcomponents without involving any other system like a special filesystem.
My bravery comes from being a software guy that’s been doing OS software development for over a decade so I believe my opinion is somewhat informed. 😂 I’m currently working on a software updates implementation for an automotive OS.
I think this is just a difference in the use case. Flatpaks are designed for desktop applications while Snap was initially designed for exactly the purpose you describe.
The initial use case for Snap, when it used to be called Click (circa 2012-13), was mobile apps for Ubuntu Touch. Those were the same as desktop Qt apps, just using the a mobile theme and layout. Canonical developers just had the foresight to create a design that isn’t limited to that use case. As a result Snap is a superset of Flatpak in terms of use cases. Flatpak can probably be rearchitected to match that if anyone cared. If that were the case I’d also be drumming it up.
The funny thing is, we wouldn’t be having any of these discussions over the merits of Snap if RedHat came up with it instead of Canonical and the server side was OSS from the get go. When RedHat was cool that is. In fact likely Canonical would have been using thet too. Just like they use PulseAudio, Systemd, and Wayland.
Because you can package and deploy OS components with it. As a result you can build an OS with it, do foolproof updates of it and …gulp, happy tear… rollback components without involving any other system like a special filesystem.
My bravery comes from being a software guy that’s been doing OS software development for over a decade so I believe my opinion is somewhat informed. 😂 I’m currently working on a software updates implementation for an automotive OS.
I think this is just a difference in the use case. Flatpaks are designed for desktop applications while Snap was initially designed for exactly the purpose you describe.
The initial use case for Snap, when it used to be called Click (circa 2012-13), was mobile apps for Ubuntu Touch. Those were the same as desktop Qt apps, just using the a mobile theme and layout. Canonical developers just had the foresight to create a design that isn’t limited to that use case. As a result Snap is a superset of Flatpak in terms of use cases. Flatpak can probably be rearchitected to match that if anyone cared. If that were the case I’d also be drumming it up.
The funny thing is, we wouldn’t be having any of these discussions over the merits of Snap if RedHat came up with it instead of Canonical and the server side was OSS from the get go. When RedHat was cool that is. In fact likely Canonical would have been using thet too. Just like they use PulseAudio, Systemd, and Wayland.