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Comment by pelagicAustral | Hacker News Reader

I'm yet to read a positive review on Snap, and while traditionally speaking I would just go with the flow, I can only tell that my experience with the Snapcraft has been infuriating. I simple cannot make the product work for me because my bandwidth is too limited, and unreliable. I struggle to install anything from Snapcraft... I know what you're thinking "that's your problem, buddy", and I partially agree, but sometimes I wish these decisions would consider a bit more than your average city slicker! (same story with Apple, always a struggle to keep a connection going to their servers)

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Actually I like using snap. Sure, it's not perfect, but for some things it just works. Sometimes it's really nice just to execute one line without downloading/extracting/installing stuff by yourself.

But flatpak does the same and has broad distribution support. The problem isn't necessarily that snap is bad (though, I would argue generally inferior in a couple regards) but that it's doing the typical Canonical thing of recreating a solution to a problem everyone else is putting efforts to already, just causing more general fragmentation of the ecosystem.

I wish flatpak had proper integration into the host system's CLI (like snap does quite well). flatpak run org.blub.foo is unergonomic.

Can't that just be solved with this?

   alias foo="flatpak run org.blub.foo"

I would bet flatpak doesn't do this by default since it doesn't hijack a native package's namespace in the way Canonical is forcing people with snap hijacking apt install, and gives you a choice.

This lets me run multiple different Chromium flatpaks alongside the native package (stock Debian apt Chromium, official Chromium flatpak, Ungoogled Chromium flatpak) without issue, for example.

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