Container installations: snaps, flats, and so on. Is Manjaro hoping to provide most of its installations through these technologies

Does Manjaro hope to replace pacman with snaps and its ilk? People seem to like them okay, but I do not like them at all for a at least a couple of reasons.

I don’t mean to protest that direction if that is the community’s will, but I do want to know up front before I get involved with this distro.

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Hello,

Pamac as cli and ui for installing packages, can handle AUR, Snaps and Flatpaks as well. Repository packages will not be replaced by any of those. Are there as a choice/option. Also, Manjaro offers appimage support/integration trough appimagelauncher, but appimages will not become the default.
Pacman can only handle repository packages. There are discussion about dropping pacman, but i think it should remain there. Regardless, that would not change the fact that Manjaro is a rolling release, and will not rely on snaps and flatpaks as defaults.
Container install? You mean something like docker? That is possible too. Not a default tho.

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Thanks. I think of the application image as a container. It is an isolated process with its own mini OS in a way. Perhaps I’m taking misleading liberty with the term. Perhaps I should not use it in this way.

No they don’t. Only those naive who fall victim to the propaganda of certain distros cough “saviours of Linux”

Manjaro is a rolling distro so a bless for not needing them

Flatpak - a security nightmare - 2 years later

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Thanks.

However some people just loves their snaps. Lazy or management-driven developers top of that list.

For me they are such an abomination that I am disappointed that Manjaro includes snap and snappy tools with its standard install.

Easy to remove, yes, and I’ve had little difficulty building applications where the developers are pushing the snaps but still… It rankles me.

Replace? I doubt it. Or rather, I think they wouldn’t gain much from doing it, as most packages are actually just imported directly from Arch Linux anyway; therefore, they would not save much time in package maintenance.

Right now, Snap and Flatpak supports are installed by default, but they are merely additional and optional sources of software. Also, Pamac can manage Snap and Flatpak (you need to enable an option to see Snap or Flatpak support in Pamac, which is not enabled by default).

It is still pretty controversial in the Linux community, especially Snap from Canonical (people seems to tolerate Flatpak a little bit more). As for myself, I don’t care about their presence in Manjaro that much, although I did not have that much of a great experience with Snap; I experienced less issues with applications shipped with Flatpak (it might be not related to Snap in itself, but rather how the build is done). However, I prefer using the traditional package (official repos or using build files from AUR) than using Flatpak, but I have to admit that I use three applications that I installed from Flathub (Discord, Microsoft Teams and Flatseal).

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My experience with Flatpak is awful. For some reason apps do not start in Ubuntu, they have stupid long “org.bla-bla.bla-bla-bla”-like names instead of their well-known normal names, which is particularly bad when searching something, etc. Snaps are also not a good option: often they are way outdated. Canonical tracking doesn’t scare me. Even my host system geo-positioning fails to detect my location, so good luck Canonical!
What’s the worst about all these so-called sandboxed apps, is a situation when 1 app is available through Flatpak only, and some other is through Snap only. The only other option is to build from the source code. Shortwave, for example, or Gnome Podcasts. That’s so ridiculous that it can be expressed only using some famous Russian swearwords (sorry English you can’t compete!)

But thanks to AUR and lots of contributors, Arch and Manjaro have access to a vast range of apps and utilities unavailable or hardly installable on other distros.

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Personally speaking, I like the fact that Manjaro offers all possibilities and the choice is yours.
I have used Snaps with some joy but at the moment I prefer the traditional way because it’s starting much faster (also with firejail as a security layer).

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