This was a fab post and helped a lot with my project! Thank you.

Great post, thank you for writing it. It really helped me understand the approachability of Flatpak from the perspective of a Python developer.

Had you come across Snapcraft (http://snapcraft.io) as well in your investigations? Was it any easier or harder to get started with?

Disclosure: I work on the team that makes Snapcraft, but I’m always curious how far it is off the goal of a frictionless experience for devs.

Hey Evan. Glad you enjoyed the post! I had not heard of snapcraft. Just read through the documentation. It does look a way more friendly on the documentation side! Based on the documentation alone, I would say it looks like a better developer experience, but I would need to play with it further to be sure.

There are a couple of things that are keeping me from exploring it further currently:

1. Flatpak currently supports more linux distributions (CentOS/Rhel and Alpine are the ones that stand out)
2. In order to build snaps, the developer has to be on Ubuntu 16.04 or use docker which raises the barrier to entry just a little bit. I do see comments that this is getting fixed soon (i.e. I'll be able to install it via snap)

Oh cool, glad to hear that :)

Yeah, we definitely have aspirations of supporting all three of those distributions (and more).

We're fixing the Ubuntu requirement in this development cycle (due October). We're moving to a VM-based environment for snap builds (https://forum.snapcraft.io/... to accomplish this, which will also ensure the same build results regardless of where you're running from.

Thanks for the feedback, it's helping us prioritise.

Could you give me the file structure, please? I am very confused as I am the only dev at my small company.

Hello Simon. Did you check out the GitHub repository? That should have complete examples.