On Jun 18, 2016 16:30, "Kevin Fenzi" <kevin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 16 Jun 2016 14:14:29 -0300
> "Gerald B. Cox" <gbcox@xxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > On Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 12:18 PM, Jiri Eischmann
> > <eischmann@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > KDE has been interested in Flatpak for over a year. They even have a
> > > KDE runtime and a couple of KDE apps packaged:
> > > https://community.kde.org/Flatpak
> >
> >
> > That's a good thing...but I noticed that the page you directed me to
> > above was just created a few weeks ago, May 30th, 2016. My point was
> > while people may well be working on it, most people don't know
> > anything about it
>
> It used to be called xdg-app, so the flatpak name is pretty new.
I'm gonna be the dick by coming out and saying this, but... I really think the rename was a mistake. Neither name is good; the Xdg-App name was too technical, and Flatpak is too vague. When it comes to marketting and marketability, Canonical won. Snaps convey the idea that they are building blocks thay "snap" into place neatly and cleanly, and they even have the "app" sound built in, which further convey their purpose. Hell, it even works as a file extension. There is a reason why .EXEcutable and .APPlication are easy to understand-- their name conveys their purpose.
XDG-App did a lot better job at conveying their purpose (they at least included "app" in their name), but the name doesn't roll off the tongue, and no one knows what XDG stands for, unless you're a developer.
With Flatpak, few people know that a "Flatpak" is the term for the "build it yourself packages" you get from Ikea". Even if they -did- know the reference, it is still a bad name because the first thing that gets mentally linked to Ikea is: "do it yourself, build it yourself, follow instructions", which is the exact opposite of what we are trying to convey. There is no "build it yourself" nature, there is no "follow instructions", the idea is "click, install, run." It's a complete misnomer.
> > - whereas snappy has been getting alot of press. Granted, it
> > formally was Ubuntu specific - but say what you want about Ubuntu,
> > they do a great job on marketing their brand. Flatpak may well be
> > superior and "better positioned" - however, unless people start
> > discussing it and marketing it - that won't make a difference and
> > we'll have a situation where the vast majority of applications are
> > packaged for snappy and not Flatpak. Is that a bad thing? I don't
> > know - but it is usually the way things end up. Just an observation.
I am not a fortune teller, I am not psychic. BUT, my gut tells me that Snappy is going to win out, especially if Canonical modifies the code to allow multiple repos (there's a bug upstream for it). They got first to market. It may not be complete. It may not work 100%, but it functions well enough to be played around with, which is more than I can say for Flatpak, given my attempts to getting LibreOffice working.
Quite frankly, I'd prefer to see AppImage succeed, it's got the better name and probably the least complex setup (ELF executable + ISO FS) and it is the closest thing (between snap, flatpak and AppImage) to "click it and it runs", like we see on OS X. I have yet to see one fail to launch or give me any kind of weird error.
Just my two cents, which I realize may not count for much.
Cheers,
Eric
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