 Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel today. I'm going to be talking about snaps versus flat packs now If you don't know what these are basically these are two competing I'm saying competing because really they're not going. I mean one's not gonna win over the other but they're two competing package management systems that are aiming to be able to package applications and then serve them to every distro so if You're using Ubuntu Flat flat packs and snaps will both work on it same thing with art same thing with fedora same thing with open Suza so on and so forth it's just a matter of you know installing the appropriate package management system that you want to use and Following the purpose appropriate syntax They're both so they're both aiming to do the same thing. They're just kind of approaching it from different ways and We're gonna talk a little bit about that today We're gonna talk a little bit about how you go about installing snaps and flat packs And we're gonna talk a little bit about the pros and cons of each of these things So strap in this is gonna be a little bit of a journey prepare for yourselves So What we're gonna do is we're gonna jump into Papa West here and This is a virtual machine and we can actually make it full screen so that it's easier to read Papa West by default does not package snaps They package flat packs, which is an interesting choice given that it's based on Ubuntu and Ubuntu is Snap focused if you install Ubuntu, you're gonna have snap installed and not flat back because Canonicals the developer of snaps So it's a little I mean this is the way Linux ratios are they choose what one they want to support If you're on Ubuntu, you're gonna get snaps if you're on pop You're gonna get flat packs if you're on elementary OS You're gonna get flat packs if you're on fedora, you're gonna get flat packs if you're on Something like solace you're gonna get snaps so Like I said the distribution is going to choose which one is installed by default That doesn't mean that you can't install the other one. So on this system here. I've installed snap D And I'll show you how to do that here in a minute But this is here actually has both of them on there and they both work just fine. I can install packages from both I Could actually install the same packages from both which would be confusing as hell But you could do that if you wanted to so just because your distribution is chosen to go one way Doesn't mean you can't install the other one and we use it completely perfectly fine Now Let's start off with flat packs. Okay, so let's just close this one here. No, this is flat hub It's not actually first. Let's talk about how you'd install flat back So let's say you're on a distribution that has support is supporting snaps and you want to use flat packs instead You just do pseudo apt install flat Pack no C Now if you're on arch or on arch based distro, you do pseudo pac-man dash capitalist flat pack That's how you install it once you've installed it You've got all the things that you need in order to install programs Now if you're going to be doing some packaging and flat pack or packaging and snaps You'll need some other programs, but I'm not gonna be covering that today. I don't know anything about it So that's how you do it if you want to if you're on a distribution that Has flat back installed but not snaps you just do the exact top you do pseudo app install snap D okay, and it'd be the same thing on arch just pseudo pac-man dash capitalist snap D Okay, once you have it installed That's where the differences start to come in just a little bit So we're gonna talk let's first talk talk about flat packs. This is flat hub. Like I said and they have similar Applications available to you so you can get Spotify from both you can get Firefox from both I Believe like something like bit warden is only available in a snap. Let's just see. I'm just curious No bit wardens available as both so Really choose which one you enjoy the syntax of best or choose the one that has the least cons We're gonna talk about the pros and cons in a minute, but let's just say I wanted to install bit one and I wanted to use flat pack to do it So I could hit this install button that would download a package It looks like this and then I have to go through the process of installing it like that You do that by getting into the terminal and doing some code and you know some commands in there I find that to be a pain that but it's kind of like a two-step process There may be another way of installing this. Maybe there's a program that I could use to Install this by just double double clicking on it. If I just double click on this now I'm just gonna get the code That's completely useless to me, right? So really what I want to do is scroll down here and copy this and then paste this in a terminal and then It's gonna ask you some questions. So I'm gonna do this system wide which is gonna probably require a password, but maybe not Yes, and it's just gonna install and then I have I'll have that word installed That's as simple as it is you go to fly hub find this code here Copy it into a terminal answer the questions that it asks you and you'll you'll see this installation complete Now if I wanted to do this, I could type in bit warden And it's just here see I now have that word installed and it's a flat pack now You'll notice that came up really quick, right? I mean we'll open it up again very fast and Just keep note of that because when we get to a snap you're gonna see the one of the cons. I'm gonna be talking about Now let's just talk about so the pros on the on the flat pack side is that it they're usually pretty fast The cons is Weird syntax so if we zoom in here just a little bit so you can actually see this Flat pack install flat hub and then calm that bit warden desktop What they really need to do is clean that up a little bit so you can do flat pack install flat hub bit warden Ignoring the other things. That's the way it should work for whatever reason They know it doesn't work that way It's really very weird Because as you'll see when we talk about snaps you can just do snap install bit warden and it would work You don't have to have that calm that bit where calm that bit one desktop is the actual name of the package Whereas I think like the snap guys actually have actually gone through and created like ali says or something I don't know exactly how it works so that you don't actually have to remember the exact name of the package That's basically flat hub. It's very easy and is very much tied into using this website Because of this weird syntax, it's gonna be a lot harder to go through and just guess what the package name is Because some some of them don't have that desktop at the end some of them have something different It's very weird. Okay, so like I said that's flat pack and as you can see It was very quick Let's talk about snaps for a minute So this is the snap thing for bit word. I'm just gonna install a different one here. Let's just do Joplin so what You've installed snap or you have snap pre-installed if you want to install packages pseudo snap install Joplin and in this case because They do a good job of Populating some kind of database or whatever for these things you do get auto complete So I don't know if you noticed it there. I was able to do Joplin and Then tab completion it gave me the actual name of the package. So if I hit enter We're gonna it's going to go through and install this package Installation time is gonna be about the same depending between these two different package management systems a Couple minutes usually it's the same thing as if you were installing it from a PPA or from the you know The a you are or whatever You're gonna run about the same amount of time because they still got to download things. I still got to build them It's a little unfair that chose Joplin because Joplin's a big package so most of the time The time is about the same across thing a few moments later So this is actually turning out to be a little bit slower than what I thought it would be but it's possible that It's slower because this is the first time I've ran snap on this virtual machine So what I'm gonna do once this is done is I'll go in and so all different snap and see if it's any faster It's possible that it has to go through and do some initial setup that it doesn't have to do every time So we'll do that I Am gonna cut these cut out some time here, so you don't actually have to sit through all this Would you've probably already noticed a few moments later? Okay, if finally decided to finish that took a good six or seven minutes Definitely a lot longer than it did to do that flat pack Normally, I don't think that that's the case. So I'm gonna choose one of these other ones. I'm gonna choose telegram. Just your pseudo a snap install telegram Bestop, okay We'll see if this takes just just as long. I don't think it will If it does take just as long it will prove me wrong by saying that they both take about the same amount of time Yeah, that wasn't nearly as bad as the Joplin one And it was actually I'm pretty sure that That their Joplin and telegram are both the same size so that initial Insult Joplin had to do some extra stuff just because it was the first time I was using snap so Now I've installed a couple snaps and I want to show you the con of using snaps Hopefully watch this prove me wrong, but I'm pretty sure if I go here and And type in Joplin, which isn't even in the seat That's interesting because apparently that's a Papa West thing Maybe I have to log out and log back in let's try that Okay, so yeah, I did I have to I had to log back out and log back in now You'll notice I did not have to do that for the flat pack now I Don't think if you're using a boon to that comes with snap pre-installed that you have to do that But let's see if my con that I'm talking about actually proves Right, so we can time this Remember how fast bit word was yeah, that was pretty slow compared and that was actually faster than what I was expecting it to be The point is snaps are slow Now let's open up telegram and see if it's the same the same way. Yeah, that was I mean it doesn't seem slow I mean it just there's an extra couple seconds there that just don't exist when you're opening up something like files files instantaneous the same thing with Let's open up that bit word again bit word instantaneous There's not that extra like one or two seconds even whatever of delay that seems to just exist so We've seen the syntax or whatever for these two things really The whole Point of this is that they're both very similar The con of flat pack is that the package names are kind of trash now. I don't know. I'm just curious Let's switch back over to this and open up a terminal I'm just curious and do if I do suit if I do flat pseudo. I think I have to do pseudo can't remember No, just flat they do flat pack install flat hub Spotify No, see this is what I'm talking about the If I wanted to install Spotify through flat hub I'd have to do calm That spotify That client so you'd have to remember that calm dot whatever in order to get tab completion And I'm not sure that every package has calm dot whatever some of them might have something else. I don't know That's messy Why can't you do Spotify and it tap completes now if you're using ZSH or fish? You might get tap completion without having to have that calm dot But in bash for sure you don't you have to do calm dot spot fly in order to get tap completion with with snap I just do pseudo snap Install Spotify and I can do you know it gives me a you know options here spot if I You know, so it was very easy. I didn't have to remember any weird, you know Naming convention and that's just that's the kind of flat pack the kind of snaps is that It's slower and it was actually faster than it used to be and it's definitely the last time I use snaps They were just horribly horribly slow, especially with Joplin is a very beefy application and it's slow when you build it from source. I mean it is so Snaps was way worse, you know a year ago or two years ago than it is now But it is still slower than flat pack and that's the big thing and there's another thing here that I want to talk about Actually now that I'm remembering it. I keep switching you back and forth, but um And this might not even be the case anymore so if I open up a Yeah, look at this here There when you install snap on a system that doesn't support it out of the box you get something crappy called a snap folder It's in your home directory. You can't get rid of it If you delete it your snaps don't work because you're basically deleting the snaps Why they can't put that in your configuration folder or make it hidden. I don't know it pisses me off I'm one of those anal retentive people that want my home directory to be as clean as possible At least in terms of what you can see like I have a ton of dot-files in my configuration full or in my home directory I can't see them all the time so it doesn't bother me nearly as much But I want the visible stuff to be You know clean and tidy I even go through and delete the templates and video in public folders usually You know because I don't need them ever. I just delete them that way. I don't have to deal with them Snap always installs this extraneous folder. I can't get rid of it and it pisses me off Irrationally mad because this folder exists and I don't want it to exist in my home directory put that shit somewhere else I'd be perfectly happy. I mean I look The way you install snaps is really good. I think it's superior to what flat pack does I Would use snaps even with how slow they are if it weren't for the stupid folder. That's yeah I mean, I know it's stupid and it is stupid, but it That's my biggest qualms with snap is that it's not completely open source Which I've talked about before in that other video and that stupid snap folder Open source it get rid of that stupid snap folder and snap is one as far as I'm concerned because of that stupid naming convention that flat Hub has so those are the two. I mean, this is really turned into a rant about both of them Personally, I think if flat hub fixed their naming conventions and just you could do flat hub install or flat pack install Spotify It'd be so much better. I mean, it would just really that's the only problem I find with thought with flat pack is that they have that weird name convention of doing calm spotify that client Or in terms of bit or and it was calm that bit Warren desktop at least make it consistent So that you can remember it and without having to look it up Which is I mean just annoying Snap on the other hand has a stupid folder and stuff, but it has some good stuff It has the good and easy naming convention easy tab completion Things in my experience for the oh snap has a slightly bigger catalog of applications than flat hub does Then I've also found that it's the applications in snaps are more Usually updated than the flat pack ones a lot of times the flat pack ones are a little bit more behind than the snaps are That's not as big of a problem as it used to be and it used to be much worse for the most part They're not even footing, but every once in a while you'll see this the snap stuff get ups gets updated Faster than the flat one and that's usually because the flat hub stuff isn't is Usually packaged by the developer themselves and that's an extra step that they have to take whereas the snap one is usually I'm not gonna say usually a lot of the times Maintained by a community member and they've taken the package from the developer and packaged it themselves So Which one should you use? That's a good question, right? Which one should you use? I'm gonna go with use the one that's installed on your distro If you're using a boot to there's no reason to use flat pack. There really isn't you you're not gonna have to deal with that stupid snap folder You'll have to deal with them being a little slower than you know a native application or Application installed through apt or whatever But it's gonna be a seamless thing to do you can just use them install them You probably won't even know their snaps. It's just the way it is If you're on elementary or on pop you flat packs because those are what's supported and They're in the software centers or whatever that they provide and it's easy to install them You probably won't even know you're dealing with flat packs The only way you'd want to use snaps is if you're you know, you find an application that you can't Isn't packaged via in the repositories or in flat pack and then you'd have to go through and get snaps Like mail spring Mail spring is not in the boot to repositories. It's packaged as a snap. It might be in flat hub now I'm not actually sure it didn't used to be some bad example So that's what I would do is just use the one that's installed with your distro because that's the one that you're going to be Faced with the least Barriers of entry. It's just going to work. You don't have to actually go through install things You don't have to deal with annoying stupid folders that just appear out of nowhere You don't have to restart your computer probably in order to get your install programs to install Whatever so which one would I would know which one do I use high use neither? I used the aur. Yeah, baby That's why this is why the aur is so good because you don't have to deal with Slowness or any of that stuff now you have obviously there's other things wrong with the aur, you know malware and Autodate packages and all that stuff, but it's day you are anyways, so that is it for us this video. Thanks for Holy crap 25 minutes of stuff. I mean, holy man. I can't believe I rambled on there long anyways Thanks for watching. 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