A beta release of CelOS (Celestial OS), a rebuild of Ubuntu 22.04 that replaces the Snap package management toolkit with Flatpak, has been released. Instead of installing additional applications from the Snap Store catalog, integration with the Flathub catalog is proposed. The size of the installation image is 3.7 GB. The developments of the project are distributed under the GPLv3 license.
The assembly includes a selection of GNOME applications distributed in the Flatpak format, as well as the ability to quickly install additional programs from the Flathub catalog. As a user interface, the usual GNOME with the Adwaita skin is proposed, in the form in which it is developed by the main project, without using the Yaru skin that is offered in Ubuntu. The regular Ubiquity is involved as an installer.
Packages aisleriot, gnome-mahjongg, gnome-mines, gnome-sudoku, evince, libreoffice, rhythmbox, remmina, shotwell, thunderbird, totem, snapd, firefox, gedit, cheese, gnome-calculator, gnome-calendar, gnome are excluded from the base distribution -font-viewer, gnome-characters and ubuntu-session. Added deb packages gnome-tweak-tool, gnome-software, gnome-software-plugin-flatpak, Flatpak and gnome-session, as well as flatpak packages Adwaita-dark, Epiphany, gedit, Cheese, Calculator, clocks, Calendar, Photos , Characters, font-viewer, Contacts, Weather and Flatseal.
The differences between Flatpak and Snap come down to the fact that Snap offers a small base runtime with container stuffing based on monolithic releases of Ubuntu Core, while Flatpak, in addition to the main runtime, uses additional and separately updated runtime layers (bundle) with typical sets of dependencies for applications to work. . Thus, Snap transfers most of the application libraries to the side of packages (recently it has been possible to move large libraries, such as GNOME and GTK libraries, to common packages), and Flatpak offers bundles of libraries common to different packages (for example, libraries have been moved to bundle required to run GNOME or KDE programs) to make packages more compact.
Flatpak packages use an image based on the OCI (Open Container Initiative) specification, while Snap uses SquashFS image mounting. For isolation, Flatpak uses the Bubblewrap layer (uses cgroups, namespaces (namespaces), Seccomp and SELinux), and to organize access to resources outside the container, the portal mechanism. Snap uses cgroups, namespaces, Seccomp, and AppArmor for isolation, and pluggable interfaces for interacting with the outside world and other packages. Snap is developed under the full control of Canonical and is not controlled by the community, while the Flatpak project is independent, provides better integration with GNOME and is not tied to a single repository.
Source: opennet.ru