I read that Ubuntu MATE has both preinstalled by default and also MakuluLinux. Is this the case in Manjaro too as i recall from one point?
Thanks.
1 Like
Welcome to the forum!
To answer your question, Manjaro has support for Snaps, FlatPaks and AppImages, but it’s not enabled by default. You can however easily enable it in the pamac GUI, which you will find in your menu as “Add/Remove Software”.
The reason why it’s enabled by default in Ubuntu is that Ubuntu uses Snaps for basically everything — which is not exactly the best philosophy.
Manjaro prefers doing things differently, and we encourage people to use the packages from our repositories instead of Snaps and FlatPaks, which are by definition not well-integrated with the underlying operating system due to the fact that they run in a containerized environment.
3 Likes
Hmm, I’d rephrase that.
It is Canonical that wishes to do things differently…
Though there is a general interest in some ‘alternative’ packages like Appimage, and Flatpak the ‘default’ for installing is actually the binary method.
If you download Firefox from Mozilla, you will get a firefox-104.0.1.tar.bz2 which unzips to a folder filled with stuff - and if you don’t know what to do with that, you’re stuffed.
So it gets packaged for the system:
Debian (Ubuntu included) would re-pack this into a DEB file, with instructions for how to install.
RHEL (Red Hat) uses RPM files - same story.
Arch (Manjaro included) uses ‘pkgfile’ which tells the OS what to do.
General Packages (more bloated, more cross platform) Flatpak is something which should work across all platforms.
With Arch and Manjaro there’s also the User Repository (AUR) where people offer things not available in the official repositories.
So, if you wanna install Obsidian…
Choices from good to bad (IMO) 1. Official (community) 2. Flatpak or Appimage and if no other options are available, Snapd might get a look… but that’s definitely the final choice.
2 Likes
It is very good that snap and flatpak are right there available to use when needed. New comers will not generally tinker at all with these more than that flick on the switch, so Manjaro is more user friendly than the approach of so many others!
We all know that a common new user just wants as easy app install on Linux as they come from Windows or macOS. Thats it and AUR can be hazardous? Rather then these sandboxed new methods isolated from the most of the system. New Linux users prolly could not care less about whether the app comes in snap, flatpak, appimage or what not… So thanks to Manjaro for convenient approach. Things are nicely available but one can choose not to utilize and go with the old way 
There seems to be a new generation of people who don’t care about anything…
We do actually care, but we want the choice to do things without too much trouble.
I’ve had AUR packages work better than flatpaks, I’ve had flatpaks work better than AUR packages.
It’s not ‘the new way vs the old way’ and the same amount of effort should still be made to work out which method of installing is good.
In many cases, choosing Flatpak/Snap is just a choice for bloat and frequently with no other benefits than using up more disk space.
1 Like
Your question was answered 9 months ago.