NEXT-GEN APP DISTRIBUTION

Flatpaks, Snaps, AppImages: they all seek to make it easier for developers to ship software in a distribution-agnostic manner. Whereas) is a good place to find popular apps. Flatpaks are OSTree images too, which is why the two integrate so nicely in Endless OS. When you download your first (non-trivial) application on Endless OS (or your first Flatpak on another OS), you’ll find the download is very large. This is because it depends on a large runtime (e.g. Gnome) Flatpak. Once you have this you won’t need to download it again for Flatpaks, which depend on it. These runtime Flatpaks are updated incrementally, so subsequent large downloads should be a rarity and (unlike deb packages) there are no issues with requiring a particular version.