Why is that? Thanks!

Seems to be a very open question missing any inputs or even references why you have this assumption. What gives you this impression in the first place? Which do you prefer? (Maybe make your question also a poll?)

If that's the best way something is available, that's what I use and do not avoid things for any particular or arbitrary reasons.

I don't use any of these things like snap and appimage. One of the things that makes Linux stable and internally simple is that all the programs collectively use the underlying layer of libraries, and all software of both types is either built locally against those libraries or carefully checked by distro devs to make sure it's 100% compatible with the system. Importing separate packages with their own library environment strikes me as the clunky Windows way of doing things.

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+1 @hazel!!

|=u(!< snap!

I never heard of snap until I read this thread. So I looked it up using google. After reading the snap explanation I shrugged my shoulders and agreed with Hazel.

This is an incredibly idealistic POV. In the real world a$$hole developers produce backwards-incompatible versions of libraries, sloppy distro maintainers take ages to update anything, and of course no distro contains all the software in the world, so unless your needs are very simple indeed sooner or later you will have to leave the ivory distro tower and venture into the real ugly and messy world, and portable packaging systems like snap make it much, much easier. They are somewhat inefficient - and this is the only objective reason to dislike them, and using them for everything is not a clever approach, but completely rejecting them is even less clever.

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There are some new Linux distros out that use an immutable root file system, and all user apps are Flatpack or the like. So the OS becomes more like a smartphone which is more intuitive for lots of users who have only used a phone before. It also seems to offer some security advantage since the apps are sand-boxed from the OS.

That said, I prefer the traditional method and removed snap from my system. It's annoying when I click the open or save button and I default to 5 layers inside the app directory and not my home dir. But I may give one of these new distros a try sometime.

Of course users will prefer their distro has software packaged in native format. That's the fastest and most efficient, and your OS handles updates and dependencies, etc.

It's developers and package maintainers that like these container formats. It's a lot easier to package one format that most everyone can use, than to (learn how to) package deb and rpm and everything else, and for every release of every distro to make sure it still works or if it needs rebuilding, etc.

Snap seems to be the least liked of the generic formats tho. I think the main reasons are it's the slowest, both slowing down boot, and slow to open apps. It's also messy looking the way it does its loop filesystem stuff. Also the only snap store is controlled by Canonical.

Ubuntu has stopped packaging a few pieces of software they used to maintain (chromium, firefox, and lxd) and want users to use the snap versions, and went so far as to automatically install the snap version when user tries to install using their package manager. Some people don't like that.

But it's certainly less work for Ubuntu. Those browsers they had to keep updating all the time, and each time they had to package for 3-4 supported ubuntu versions.

Many = The people on forums right? You realize that when people are perfectly content with something they tend to just use it and not actively pile on praise. When someone isn't happy they are all to eager to let people know. Bottom line, many is subjective. I'd guess (entirely off the top of my head) that for every person you see bashing these things you will find 5-10 that don't much care and further don't even notice or realize they are being used. Probably much higher number than that honestly. They just won't go out of their way to tell everyone "guess what... it works".

This principle is usually consistent with damn near any product or thing people sell / give away.

Not everyone is a power user that needs to know every detail of their system.

You are absolutely right. Most people,will only go to a forum when they have a problem they need answers to. So 'it seems' like a bigger crowd of 'complainers' than there actually is. That said, it makes one wonder what the ratio is of 'forum users' to 'users' of say Ubuntu. I know my dad for example is just a happy 'user' of KUbuntu LTS, never been on a forum ever or aware of snaps, apt, and all that goes with it.

What are seeing is how your perception can be 'twisted' by social media when in reality, that isn't how it is at all. Politics especially on twitter, facebook, and all, make it seem like almost 'everyone' dislikes a candidate when that isn't reality at all. Not even close.

I don't dislike snaps. Just don't see a need for it really. As I've said before, I don't notice anything different about using Firefox as a snap, or as a native application. Maybe a 1/2 second more load time is all.

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I believe, (maybe wrongly), that 'snap' supplies all necessary programs & libraries to run each program, thereby adding extra duplicate code onto your computer, & those of us who know that most, if not all libraries, on a regular distro are shared between programs that require parts of said libraries, don't want duplication, & it's that fact that makes some people avoid their usage.

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I can understand the developer concerns with maintenance - especially where there might only be one. A few years back there was a discussion initiated by the (main) dev for digiKam that eventually picked appimage. Good choice IMHO - prior to that I had a bunch of problems (fonts, themes) running a primarily KDE app on gnome.

Not so enamoured with Canonical (again) trying to control the world with yet more bloat at the system level.. Flatpak I'm so far ambivalent about.

So ... each to their own.

Maybe the future is that every program will be a 2GB self-contained image. Just download and run. When storage and bandwidth are cheap it's harder and harder to argue against.

Suppose I want to run program abc. Under the old model I also need to download and install libxyz. Under the new model libxyz is part of the image. What happens when a vulnerability is found in libxyz? Which is going to get me safe sooner? The distro updating libxyz or a new snap image for every program that uses libxyz? Personally I would rather get the updated libxyz and risk breaking some apps than have an unknown number of vulnerable copies of libxyz running on my system.

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I prefer the idea of shared libraries and such, is what brought me to linux in the first place. But the convenience factor is hard to beat for appimage, snap, flatpak. Especially when flatpak and appimages don't need super user to install. For people who may just want an alternative to Win / OSx they make it smoother without having to learn an entirely new concept. Appimages in particular are great as far as I'm concerned because there is no folder with 50 files, just a single file that can be anywhere you want. I find that very interesting.

This is where shared libraries shine the most for me. It's a trade off like anything though. You can't have it both ways. Either safe and more involved / difficult or ridiculously easy but easily punched through. Guess it depends on you needs like anything.

Also remember the situation of possibly cloud-based corporate users who might have hundreds of images to maintain and only a relatively small staff with which to do it. They simply want a fast way to install something new, and to do it in such a way that it won't be dependent on – and, won't break – anything else that is already there. At this point, "storage capacity is no longer a concern." They don't care if things are "duplicated." They have gigabytes to burn. While this technology may not be your cup of tea, maybe it wasn't really designed for your use-case anyway. Today, there are many very-different deployment scenarios that Linux needs to be able to satisfy all at once. (And that's what's so great about Linux: it actually can.)

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