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Comment by hathawsh | Hacker News Reader

Canonical's Snap system is intended to solve this. Snaps are packages that bundle their dependencies, so they are bigger, but they run successfully on most modern versions of Linux.

https://snapcraft.io/

AppImage solves the problem in a different way, although AppImage doesn't have a concept of automatic upgrades like Snap:

https://appimage.org/

I suppose one could put an appimage in a snap, leading to either the best or worst of both worlds.

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One of the problems with these systems - maybe they've solved it by now? - is that they bundle up virtually everything for a running system, including the GUI - so any custom theme you have outside of the "package" doesn't translate over.

There are other downsides, too.

At the same time, the upsides of such systems are really nice; they are very much reminiscent of MacOS apps - and that I really like. If the whole theming and such can be fixed - it would be perfect.

Unfortunately they have to do that, because there the only thing you can count on being present in any given Linux system is the kernel.

They don't really need any new system for that, apt can perfectly handle that.

For example, they could have an optional "recent applications" repository that you add if you want up-to-date applications. This way Firefox, LibreOffice, etc would be up2date but the system would be stable.

If you install Chrome on an LTS by the way, it will come with the Google repository and be always up2date.

> although AppImage doesn't have a concept of automatic upgrades

It does: https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageUpdate

Thanks, I had no idea. I don't know how to update the AppImages I use except by downloading new AppImages manually.

I really really wish AppImages were embraced by more of the Linux Desktop community.

> although AppImage doesn't have a concept of automatic upgrades like Snap

And that's a good thing. If I wanted my system to force software updates on me, I'd use windows.

Users should always have the ability to control updates. Always.

I use snaps at work and they are damn slow at opening, insomnia takes a got 30 seconds to open and viscose takes 5-10.

I7 4/8 16gb and ssd. Laptop isn't a slouch

I think snaps magnify developer mistakes. These are probably really badly written nodejs apps.

I have tons of snaps and the only one that is really slow is Cura.

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