Starting out with Budgie

HI GUYS!
Can someone explain to me what theese are at the budgie startup screen regarding apps I belive:

  1. Budgie applets
  2. Software center
  3. Snap apps
  4. Flatpak apps

Best regards

1. Applets are features you add to your desktop panel⋅s, they are shortcuts or helpers to many kind of actions : an app’ menu, icons for your favorite and running app’s, workspace switcher, indicators for this or that… so it’s specific to your Budgie desktop environment.

2. is a graphical front-end to install and remove app’s, see it as a software store. It shows you the app’s available for your Ubuntu system, from official repositories. There you may search for software by category ( science, office, games… ) or name ( Scribus, VLC, Audacity… ) and install ( or remove ) them.

3. & 4. are recent way of « packaging » app’s. The traditional / legacy way of packaging app’s for Ubuntu is .deb/APT and remains the easiest, best integrated and trusted way to deal with app’s.
Those new monsters aim at being « universal » which is to say they don’t depend on a specific Linux distribution to work : a snap or flatpak package will work on any Linux system where snap or flatpak framework is already installed.

Those new monsters are an easiest way for developers to provide their work easily : they package once and it works everywhere, they update once and it’s updated for all. But for user this « universality » comes at various costs.
⋅ much more storage is needed by these new packaging systems, as each app’s will come bundled with all its needed dependencies,
â‹… they are sandboxed which may sound interesting on a safety point of view but then user has to deal with authorizations for each app ( ie. to access other partitions, to use this or that input device, etc )
â‹… recent and fast systems are required ( snap are notably slow on only HDD setups )
â‹… theming is sometimes broken or also needs to be dealt with by the user for each app.

tl;dr

anytime you have the choice between a legacy .deb package and one of those new packages, always prefer the legacy one. Use snap or flatpak only for app’s that are not available at all in legacy package.

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