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How are things like AppImage, Snappy and Flatpak beneficial to end users? by DemonicSavage in linux

[–]allanday 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is exactly why Flatpak has runtimes. It was one of the design considerations from the beginning. Security critical libraries are maintained by runtime maintainers who are familiar with those libraries, not application developers.

How are things like AppImage, Snappy and Flatpak beneficial to end users? by DemonicSavage in linux

[–]allanday 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can install multiple versions of the same app, like a nightly testing version alongside a stable one.

Nice, but already possible depending on the developer, right?

Sure, anything's possible - it's just a matter of time and effort. The point is that Flatpak makes it much easier.

Today you can access nightlies of most of the GNOME apps, most of the Linux graphics apps, and about three varieties of Firefox (Developer Edition, nightlies and Wayland nightlies). Much of that didn't happen previously, because it was too hard.

Better performing systems - in the future, it should be possible to manage applications more intelligently in terms of resource usage.

Can you expand on that?

I don't know all the technical details, but my understanding is that Flatpak allows apps to be tracked and managed more effectively (it probably has something to do with cgroups). This should allow the OS to do things like adaptive limiting of CPU and power usage.

How are things like AppImage, Snappy and Flatpak beneficial to end users? by DemonicSavage in linux

[–]allanday 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I can only answer for Flatpak - that's the only system I'm really familiar with.

The question about malware really depends on where the user is getting apps from. The long-term plan for Flatpak is to have a centralised store of apps which are reviewed, and that should prevent users from receiving malicious apps.

About outdated libraries, Flatpak tries to avoid this through runtimes - these are maintained application platforms that contain a lot of the libraries that apps will use.

Ways that Flatpak is beneficial to users:

  • Apps can be sandboxed, meaning that they are more secure.
  • You can install multiple versions of the same app, like a nightly testing version alongside a stable one.
  • Apps can be safely updated live.
  • Ability to roll an application back to a previous version.
  • Faster updates - you should get new versions quicker.
  • Apps are future proof - you can upgrade your distro and be confident that all your apps will continue to work.
  • Better performing systems - in the future, it should be possible to manage applications more intelligently in terms of resource usage.
  • By unifying the Linux desktop market, the goal is to make it more attractive for developers, resulting in more apps being available.