 Today, I come to you as a broken man. I have been thoroughly defeated by rolling release distributions such as Arch Linux. You guys know I run Arch Linux and Arch based Linux distribution, and I'm really getting frustrated with my updates and programs that I depend on constantly breaking. So in the last two months or so, I've had some of the programs that I depend on to actually do my work as an audio-video content creator, right? I've had many of the important programs that I depend on break due to updates. A couple of months ago, I noticed that for whatever reason, an update broke GIMP. I use GIMP practically every day to create thumbnails for my videos, all the artwork for the channel, any kind of images that I create sometimes to inline within the video. I do all of that stuff in GIMP and for whatever reason, GIMP just decided to break on an update. By break, I don't mean that GIMP no longer launches. It launches just fine. I start creating a thumbnail, for example, but after a few minutes, GIMP just hard crashes. I mean, it just completely, the window closes, and I just lose all the work that I had been working on, and that was very, very frustrating. So I started using an app image for GIMP. I uninstalled GIMP from Pac-Man, and I just decided I was just going to use the app image of GIMP just because the app image worked and it didn't crash. And then I did a video a couple of months back about my frustrations with KadenLive. KadenLive broke on an update for me a couple of months ago. I had the same situation on the last update of KadenLive as well. Just a few days ago, there was a new update to KadenLive, and now, for whatever reason, KadenLive crashes any time I try to render a video unless I tick off parallel processing, right? No more parallel processing in KadenLive, which means render times would be horrendously slow, and I can't do that. That's just a lot of wasted extra time now involved in me rendering my videos, because for whatever reason, this latest version of KadenLive won't render with parallel processing. So I've been using the app image of KadenLive, and then just a couple of days ago, and this was really the last straw, right? I needed to do something in LibreOffice Writer with the word processor. I needed to do something with proper formatted word processing. So I fired up LibreOffice Writer. It never launched. I thought maybe, you know, when I typed L-O Writer in D-Menu, maybe I misspelled it. Open the terminal. L-O Writer. Nothing happens, right? It just crashes. It doesn't really tell me why I get some cryptic error message about a free type or something, some library, some broken dependency. And I kind of have an idea what the dependency is that broke LibreOffice. So I'm thinking, well, I'll just downgrade that dependency because the older version of that dependency LibreOffice was still working on. So I'll just downgrade the dependency. I can't because if I downgrade the dependency that broke LibreOffice, it breaks other things, right? It breaks several other programs on the system. So I'm in this weird kind of dependency hill where I have no choice. I either stick with the current versions of some of these libraries on my system that break some of the programs I depend on or I try to downgrade. But the downgrading process will break other programs that are not quite as essential. But still, I don't want to have to break some programs to fix others. So how did I fix my LibreOffice problem? Well, naturally, I wanted to go and grab the app image because I know, you know, there's an app image for practically everything over on appimagehub.com. I went to the app image hub and I was going to download an app image of LibreOffice. But app images, one of the things about app images is you can grab an app image for practically every version of a piece of software. You know, every time they make a new app image for the new version, you can always grab app images of the old versions as well. I got confused because there were like 50 different app images for LibreOffice listed on app image hub because you got LibreOffice fresh. You've got LibreOffice still and then you've got all of the past versions that have ever been app imaged of LibreOffice. I'm like, I don't know which one I should choose here. And, you know, I was thinking, you know, I don't mind using flat packs. I don't mind using snap packages either. I know a lot of people really hate snaps. A lot of people really hate flat packs and a lot of people really hate app images. Some people hate all of those formats because they think these dystro agnostic formats are bad, I guess, for the late Linux ecosystem in some way. But for me, I've always meant appreciative that these things are out there because they do solve real world problems, especially if you need a piece of software and it isn't in your repose or it's packaged in your Linux distributions repose, but that version is broken. Then, yeah, you're going to love app images. You're going to love flat packs. You're going to love snaps because if the choice is I can either use a snap flat pack or app image and actually work with a program or I can not. Obviously, I'm going to go grab the snap or the flat pack or the app image. So what I actually decided to do since I'm a big fan of app images and I've been using app images for so many things for for the last couple of years. Really, I decided, you know what? I'm going to go hardcore into some of these other packaging formats, like maybe flat packs. So what I did is I decided, you know what? I'm going to instead of doing the app image, I'm going to grab LibreOffice as a flat pack againp as well. Kate and live as well. They're all available as a flat pack and unlike app image where you have to go and grab an app image off the internet. You know, these these self-contained executables off the internet. Flat pack, of course, is a real package manager at the command line. I can just flat pack install name of program and also update all of my programs. The updates take care of themselves automatically. And it's just nice, especially if you don't mind taking the updates. A lot of times with the app images, I keep app images of programs that I never want to update. So that's a nice thing with app images, but a lot of people do want their software updated. So I thought, you know what? I'm going to install all the programs I use on a regular basis as a flat pack. And that didn't last long. That lasted for just a few hours because I realized I could not launch those flat packs from D menu, which is a bit of a problem because D menu doesn't read like desktop entries. It scans your system for everything in the path as far as executables in your shells path and flat packs are not there. I could add it. But here's the problem. Even if I add the path, you're going to have these programs that are flat packs, but just so when you search for something in D menu and then you search all the binaries on your system, for example, GIMP, you know, you'll have a D menu entry for GIMP and you hit enter. And what D menu does is it executes the command GIMP, which launches GIMP and that works for standard packages. It works for a lot of different packaging formats on Linux. It doesn't work for flat pack because how do you run a flat pack? Well, you can't just type the name of a program and a terminal or a run launcher and it launches the flat pack. No, because these flat packs have weird names like, you know, GIMP is not going to be GIMP. It's going to be C O M dot some other word dot GIMP right. It's going to be and you can't just even type that in and run it. You have to do flat pack space run space and then that C O M dot whatever the hell GIMP command is. And that that causes serious problems, especially for those of us that script with things like D menu and Rofi and you're trying to pipe that stuff into these scripts. And then you have to add you have to tack on that flat pack run command at the beginning of the flat packs where no other binaries on your system need that. It's just it's a bit of a headache. I know that's a bit of a minor gripe. It probably won't apply to most people out there. But for those of us that do a lot of scripting and tinkering on the system, I don't like that. I really think that was a bad choice by the flat pack folks to to name the flat packs in such weird names and the fact that I can't just type the name of a program and have it execute that's a little iffy. So what I did is I quickly decided, you know what? I'm going to move on from flat pack. I'm going to install library office and gimp and Kate and live and all these other programs that I depend on and I no longer want managed by Pacman. I'm going to install them as snap packages. And you know what? I like it. I like it a lot for all the hate that snaps get. It does a lot of things really well. For example, you know, it shows up in every menu system. All of your snaps will always show up in any kind of menu system, but even something like the menu, which doesn't read desktop entries. It looks for the executables in your shells path. Well, when you install a snap, it automatically adds snaps to your path. I didn't have to go and do that. I didn't have to go edit any kind of, you know, bash configs and dot profiles or anything like that. You know, the snap just takes care of that for the user. Snaps are already in your path. It's going to show up in any menu system and just typing the word gimp, for example, executes gimp as a snap. I don't need to do snap run gimp or, you know, it's not some weird name that's not really gimp. You know, it's just the word gimp. You type it into a terminal or a run launcher hidden or gimp launches and that's really nice. And of course, snaps have their own package manager and it automatically updates the snaps for you. You never have to enter a command at a terminal or it takes care of all of that for the user. The user never has to even think about updating their software unless an update breaks. So if a new version is rolled out and it breaks on you, you can always roll back to a previous version and you can have multiple versions of software. You can do this actually with snaps, flat packs and app images and that's one of the real benefits of these distro agnostic package formats is that when something breaks, you can go to a previous version and because it's not managed by your Linux distributions package manager, you don't have to worry about weird things like dependency hill because rolling back to a previous version of a snap package doesn't affect any other program on the system. It doesn't affect any of the other snap packages on the system. It doesn't affect any of the natively installed packages on the system. So I've been really happy with snap packages so far with all of these snap packages that I've had to use. I know a lot of people have real problems with the speed of snaps as far as the startup speed. It's fine. Once a program launches, you don't notice anything being a slow or glitchy or anything. But a lot of people don't like that sometimes these snap packages take a few extra seconds to launch and I'll be honest, I've never had that big of a deal with these snap packages taking a long time to load. Honestly, the only ones that have ever frustrated me is oddly enough on camera. You guys have seen some really slow snap packages sometimes launch on me when I've tried out some of the recent versions of Ubuntu. For whatever reason, snaps on Ubuntu sometimes can take a long time to launch. I don't know why, but snaps on my ArchBase systems are usually pretty good. Sometimes the very first time you launch a snap package, it takes a few extra seconds. But after that, things are kind of peppy, right? I'm sure it does take a second or two extra for some of these bigger programs especially to launch than if they were natively installed, but we're really talking a couple of seconds. LibreOffice, for example, is a massive program. It's going to take a while to launch whether it's natively installed or a snap package because LibreOffice just takes several seconds to load. That's why big programs like LibreOffice have these splash screens that, you know, you get the little box with the LibreOffice artwork and maybe you'll get a little slider or, you know, some kind of little thing letting you know, hey, the system is loading. You know, LibreOffice is loading because these big programs, these developers know their program's going to take so long to launch. They give you that splash screen just as a visual confirmation. Hey, you launched the program. It's launching. Just give it a little time, right? The snap for LibreOffice, I'll be honest, takes, I don't know, six, seven, maybe eight seconds to launch on my machine. But again, LibreOffice took a few seconds to launch even as a native package. So again, I haven't really noticed any major speed issues. I definitely haven't noticed any speed issues with Kate and Live as a snap, as far as the launching. Same thing with GIMP, works just fine. Kate and Live, by the way, renders videos with parallel processing as a snap, which again, that was what was broken on my machine. GIMP as a snap has not crashed one time. GIMP crashes every single time it launches right now as the natively installed Arch package. So it fixes all of my issues. Zero AD, you guys know I'm a big fan of zero AD and I've told you guys for years that the best packaging format for zero AD the game is the snap pack because the snap servers are really fast and zero AD is a big download and it installs faster as a snap than typically any other format. Also, if you're on a non-rolling release distribution and you want the latest and greatest software such as the latest version of zero AD, you need something like a snap pack, right? Because again, it's always gonna be updated for you. So I just wanted to keep you guys up to speed on some of my package format choices. I'm a big fan of app image. Again, I don't mind flat packs or snaps as well so I'm trying out snaps right now and of course I'll keep you guys updated on my journey if I run into any issues where snaps just frustrate me and I uninstall them all and move on to something else or maybe go back to app images or whatever it happens to be, of course. We'll get that on video. Peace, guys.