Both snaps and Flatpak can boast support from major open source application developers. While the Ubuntu snap announcement mentioned Firefox, LibreOffice, Krita, and Mycroft, the Flatpak team said applications already available as Flatpaks include LibreOffice, GIMP, InkScape, MyPaint, and Darktable. The Document Foundation, developer of LibreOffice, said Flatpak will help it “distribute a better LibreOffice, with up-to-date dependencies and a platform that can run on many systems.”
“Linux desktops are also adopting Flatpak,” the announcement said. “A fully functional GNOME runtime has been available since March: this allows application developers to build and distribute Flatpaks using the GNOME development stack. Work on a similar runtime for KDE is proceeding.”
Though Flatpak doesn’t require the use of any particular desktop enviornment or operating system, the project has close ties to GNOME and Red Hat. The Flatpak.org domain is registered by the GNOME Foundation, and Red Hat’s Fedora project participated in today’s Flatpak announcement, with Red Hat Senior Manager Christian Schaller saying, “we plan to continue supporting this effort going forward and help advocate it to a wider audience.”
Flatpak pointed out that developers can contribute to the project “with no copyright assignment or contributor license agreement required.” Ubuntu developer Canonical requires contributors to sign a contributor license agreement, though contributors still own the copyright.
Developers of both Snap and Flatpak say they hope to decrease the fragmentation that makes it hard to package applications for all Linux distributions—though that might be difficult with multiple systems for cross-platform distribution. Users can install Flatpak or snap themselves, but different Linux operating systems could support one or the other by default, instead of both.
Snap and Flatpak aren’t the only new cross-distribution application packaging technologies either, as there is also AppImage and OrbitalApps. But they have different focuses: AppImage doesn’t have the same security features, while OrbitalApps is designed for making apps portable, so you can carry them on a USB stick and run them on any computer.