I am sorry but I wanted to know the view and opinion of the people regarding snap.
The official universal package manager for fedora is adorable and I really love to use it…
But the problem is some application such as webstorm and other IDE was unavaible for me on the software(of fedora). So, I googled it and one told me to install snap. But when I surf around the internet I found people saying that snap is bad for certain reasons which I Pretty didn’t get anything. But he concluded that faltpak was great than snap? and snap is not good
All I wanted to know about is what do you feel about snap and why some people are telling it is bad for some reasons…
Please let me know because my heart is suspecting that my software store is malfunctioning due to snap…
Can anyone tell me how to install apps that are not available for fedora software store?
I am sorry if this topic creates kind of controversy among us…
Hello.
Snap is a technology well integrated with the Ubuntu ecosystem. It could work also on Fedora, but the preferred similar technology is Flatpak.
The main difference (apart some technical difference that I have never delved into) is that the Snap “repository” is proprietary, or better, software developers can’t hypotetically set up their own third party Snap repositories where to store their packages, but it is more like the [someBigTechName] app Store: centralized and without the option for the user to point to another or more than one app store.
Why we have Snap, Flatpak, and even Appimage? Same reason because we have many Linux distributions and various packaging technologies (RPM, DEB, etc.)
For the records, the opinion of some people is that Flatpak is bad too (the main concern is that inside flatpaks as well inside snaps could live old libraries and so on with unpatched security issues, while in a classical packaging system, all the packaged software need to be updated as the distribution go along), and they prefer “old” style packages (RPM).
On Fedora, I tend to prefer Flatpak. It’s fast and pretty safe. (Some would say it’s not safe enough, they might be right, but again nothing is ever really safe…)
As @alciregi explained Flatpak has the advantage of being a bit more open than Snap. The main repository is called Flathub which you can see here: https://flathub.org/
To install this Flatpak repository, click on the “Quick setup” button on the Flathub page. Choose your distribution (most probably Fedora) and click and open the “Flathub repository file” with GNOME software and that’s it!
You might need to wait a few minutes so that the repositories get updated, but then you can use GNOME software to install any software from Flathub as well. When the software exists in several repositories (RPM and Flathub for instance), a listbox will appear on the top-right corner.
Fedora uses RPM as packaging format. DNF (formerly YUM) is the package manager. GNOME Software make use of the RPM repositories configured in the system (please note that it isn’t a simple fronted to DNF, indeed it shows only a subset of the available packages). GNOME software is perfectly integrated with Flatpaks, supposing that you have configured a flatpak repository (like the one mentioned by @creak).