Re: [pygame] Playing with Flatpak packaging

[Thomas Kluyver <takowl@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 26 February 2017 at 20:14, Charles <ccosse@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

What does it have over Docker?

Short answer: Docker is aimed at server applications, Flatpak at desktop applications.

Longer answer: I'm not sure I know enough about the technologies involved to really do them justice. But the sandboxing in Flatpak is built with awareness of desktop Linux technologies, like X, Wayland, OpenGL, PulseAudio and DBus. There's also a 'portals' mechanism which allows the user to do things like opening files that would normally be outside the app's sandbox. And Flatpak is getting integrated into GUI installer tools like gnome-software, so it should be possible to install apps without using the command line (this doesn't seem to fully work just yet, but the pieces are coming together).

Of course, some of this is stuff that *could* be done on top of Docker - Subuser is an interesting effort to do precisely that. But Flatpak seems to have the backing of the GNOME developers, and KDE are starting to do stuff with it as well, so it looks to me like the front runner at the moment.

I should also mention Snappy here, which is Canonical's horse in the sandboxed Linux packaging race. I've played around with that a bit too (I'm interested in this stuff ;-), but my impression is that Flatpak is more likely to become a standard, because:

1. The desktop Linux community is suspicious of stuff from Canonical, rightly or wrongly

2. Snappy also targets server and mobile use cases, and I get the impression Canonical's more interested in those than in desktops (they've found it hard to make money on desktops, I believe)

3. The architecture underlying Flatpak is more sophisticated than that of Snappy (my impression); I think its separation of apps and 'runtimes' will make it marginally more palatable to people who like using shared dependencies.

Thomas