On Wednesday 26 February 2025 23:18:15 dep via tde-users wrote:
My point was that the issue should be of concern to all of us because it isn't just Skype but many applications that are falling prey to snap/flatpak/appimage. That there might be a way to make them more useful but it is not employed.
They can be useful:
I wanted to install kscanpage, which is KDE stuff.
PC 1: I install it as flatpak, it finds my ScanSnap scanner. No KDE stuff installed directly on my system.
PC2: the flatpak install doesn't see the Epson scanner (maybe does not have some Epson drivers I had to install). I uninstalled the flatpak and installed kscanpage form the repository. Installed some KDE stuff but would not start. From cli I found out some things where missing. I had to install a bunch of other KDE stuff (without knowing what was really needed) and now kscanpage does work, but I have KDE stuff on my system that I probably never can remove because I don't know exactly what and where.
Maybe they could be made better, but in my experience flatpaks are useful, and sometimes even necessary: OpenBoard won't install outside of Ubuntu (dependancy problems) but the Flatpak works very well.
Another point that has not been raised: snaps require systemd. Flatpaks do not (my system does not use systemd, so it's out for snaps).
Thierry