Flatpak package

[prcastro]

Would be nice to have a Flatpak package for cerebro, so we can install easily on every Linux distro

[maximbaz]

Electron-builder doesn't support Flatpack yet - vote for it here: electron-userland/electron-builder#512

You may also be interested to share your opinion in #117.

[KELiON]

omg, one more Linux package format 😱.

@prcastro we are planning to add support for snap packages. Why would you prefer Flatpak over snap?

[prcastro]

Snap is a centralized approach by Canonical. Flatpak is made by RedHat, in a more distributed fashion. The number of contributors of Flatpak is higher than Snap or AppImage, and it's being used by GNOME (on distros like Fedora, RedHat, Arch and others) and it's been considered by KDE and elementaryOS as the next default packaging format. Skype, Telegram, Spotify, Libreoffice, Blender and GNOME apps all have flatpaks available.

Also, the security approach used by Flatpak seems much better than snap. It works by using portals to communicate to the exterior world. Also, flatpak apps are much smaller, since they can share a runtime (a bunch of common libs, that are independent from the apps, like OpenSSL).

Good reference:
https://www.happyassassin.net/2016/06/16/on-snappy-and-flatpak-business-as-usual-in-the-canonical-propaganda-department/

Cassidy James (developer of elementaryOS):

If you want to distribute your snaps, your choices are
1) publish it through the Canonical store, entirely under Canonical’s control,
2) upload it as a file and tell people to use the CLI to install it, or
3) try to figure out how to reconfigure the snap client to use a different
server by reading the source code, then write your own server end from scratch,
and tell your users to do that

[dar5hak]

Agree with @prcastro, except that Canonical no longer controls the roadmap of snap. They handed it over to a committee which has people from elementary, Fedora, KDE, etc.

Not saying it's the better format, just mentioning a recent change. 🙂

[ogustavo-pereira]

We are not building for flatpack at the moment.