Replacing Native Apps With Snaps And Flatpaks? (Don't Do It!)

So over the years I have been a fan of some of these third-party packaging formats, these distroaggnostic containerized packaging formats like snaps and flat packs and app images. I quite like them, right? I have never really criticized them. They allow you to get software sometimes that you otherwise could not get on a system. But at the same time, a lot of people do criticize these kinds of non-native package formats, and I understand some of the criticism. So, I've been running an experiment the last 3 months or so. Back in November, I had to do a fresh install on my workstation here at the office. I wiped out the existing Arch Linux install and did a fresh install of Cache OS with the Qile window manager. I eventually installed the Neri Whan compositor on top of it, but I've kept things kind of minimal. The only two window managers on this system are Qile and Neri, right? And I I haven't installed like a ton of extra stuff. I've been trying to keep things kind of minimal to see if going back to that minimalistic kind of, you know, life that I used to have, would that solve some of my stability issues? would it make my system a little bit more dependable, a little more reliable? And one of the things I decided to do was I was only going to install native Arch packages on this machine if it wasn't in the Arch repos or the AUR. I wasn't going to install it. So, no snaps, no flat packs, no app images. I did make one exception. I have one app image sitting on this system because it's a program I absolutely have to have and it's only available as an app image. But other than that one program and app images are a little different because they're these, you know, self-contained executables, right? They're they're quite a bit different than snaps and flat packs. So, you know, take that for what it is. But other than that one program, you know, I've got about 1500 packages installed using Pac-Man. That's it. There's 12 or so packages installed from the AUR. So those obviously, you know, typically you wouldn't want to install a whole bunch of stuff from the AUR either for stability, right? But there's about 12 things that I had to install from the AUR. One of them is the dank material shell, the DMS shell that I use that sits on top of Neri. It's kind of an important program and I need it. So it's in the AUR. I installed it from the AUR. There's a couple of fonts that I installed from the AUR fonts. You don't have to worry about stability with fonts, right? They're not a program that gets run, right? So, you know, there's a few things that I installed from the AUR, but just a few. But you know, one of the things I love about this system now and you what I've noticed over the last 3 months is and I I had forgotten this is that when you only deal with native packages, native Arch packages on this machine or if you're a Debian user, uh native Debian packages or native Auntu packages if you're on Auntu, you know, whatever the system it is, man, things run so much faster. things just work. And it's something I forgot because I've been using snaps and flat packs and app images for years, more than a decade. I mean, snaps been around since what when did snaps first come out? Like 2008, 2009. Like flat packs were right behind it just within a few months. And then AB images, you know, not long after that. These things have been around forever. And it I've been using these package formats for so long on all of my systems, you know, I I forgot how fast native packages launch compared to the same package as a snap or flat pack or app image. Like it is noticeable, right? I know a lot of people complain about the speed and you know speed is you know if something is fast or slow it's kind of relative, right? It's your own subjective opinion but you notice it you know when you put them side by side there's a definite difference. Another thing that, you know, it doesn't really affect me because I'm not somebody that really cares about theming and aesthetics, but snaps and flat packs and app images, they have problems respecting them, right? Your global theming on your system, right? Native packages respect the theming and they just look better, right? They look like they belong where those other package formats a lot of times they look, you know, alien, foreign to the system, right? they just don't look right. Another problem with these containerized formats that live in a sandbox is sometimes the applications don't have the functionality that needs to be there because they're restricted. They're restricted in what they can access as far as hardware or they're restricted in being able to access certain files and directories on the system. That's a problem. Sometimes these containerized package formats don't respect uh standard config file locations. you know, things like that, you know, just standards. They don't respect the standards, right? And that leads to less than consistent uh performance sometimes. You know, sometimes the behavior is a little weird using those third party packages. But probably the biggest thing is just the convenience of using native packages. When I go and update my system with a sudo Pac-Man sy, it updates every package on this system minus those 12 packages from the AUR which may or may not need to be updated depending on what they are. Uh, you know, of course, if I didn't have those, literally every package on my system would get updated from a Pac-Man sy. I don't then have to go, well, I got snaps on the system. Let me go do a snap update. Got some flat packs on the system. Let me do a flatp pack update, right? I don't have to worry about that. And with app images, some of them auto update, some of them don't. If they don't auto update, you need to go download the latest version of that app image. It is a pain in the ass that I don't have to deal with anymore. Also, when you're installing everything from your native package manager, such as Pac-Man on Arch, I know that those packages were created by people at Arch that work on Arch. Those programs have been optimized to work on Arch. Who in the hell made the flat pack, right? You don't know. You don't know what DRO they run. It damn sure hasn't been optimized to run on your specific DRO, unless by some coincidence that the maintainer of that package runs your DRO. So, that's something to consider. You know, the Arch packages that I install from Pac-Man are designed to be run on a Arch Linux distribution. That matters. And of course, all that boils down to is I can trust the packages I installed, native packages. I can trust those because those were built by the team that develops this operating system that I'm running, right? I can trust those packages. And there's always potential of things sliding through, malware, things like that. Every package format deals with it, but I think I can trust my native Arch packages that come from the standard Arch repos. I think I can trust that stuff a hell of a lot more than I can trust a snap or a flat pack or app image because anybody gets to create those things. And depending on where you're pulling them down from on the internet, they may or may not be curated at all. Ultimately, I think this just leads to a more reliable and a more stable desktop Linux experience. I'm not sure if I'm going to keep this pure native package format only kind of thing going on. I may or may not install some snaps and flat packs and app images along the way. And again, I don't necessarily dislike those package formats. I've been using them for years, but I do recognize now that I've gone back to, you know, pretending like those formats don't exist and just use pure native packaging, it's a nicer experience. I'm not going to lie. I I got to be 100 with you guys. I always try to be 100. Native packaging is just better, right? It's a better overall experience. It's a much more consistent experience. It's much more stable. It's much more reliable. That's all I've got, guys. Peace.

Since doing a fresh Linux installation on my office workstation three months ago, I've been doing a little experiment. I've only installed native Arch packages on this machine. That's right! No snaps or flatpaks or any of that sort of thing. And it's been GREAT! WANT TO SUPPORT THE CHANNEL? 💰 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/distrotube 💳 Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=MW3ZFGS8Q9JGW 🛍️ Amazon: https://amzn.to/2RotFFi 👕 Teespring: https://teespring.com/stores/distrotube DT ON THE WEB: 🕸️ Website: http://distro.tube 📁 GitLab: https://gitlab.com/dwt1 🗨️ Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@distrotube 👫 Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DistroTube/ 📽️ Odysee: https://odysee.com/@DistroTube:2 FREE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE THAT I LIKE: 🌐 Brave Browser - https://brave.com/ 📽️ Open Broadcaster Software: https://obsproject.com/ 🎬 Kdenlive: https://kdenlive.org 🎨 GIMP: https://www.gimp.org/ 💻 VirtualBox: https://www.virtualbox.org/ 🗒️ Doom Emacs: https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs Your support is very much appreciated. Thanks, guys!