Packaging in GNU/Linux

We get frequently asked why we don’t do flatpack or appimage or arch packages or… for our VPN. There are many distros and many package managers in GNU/Linux. Sadly our time is limited and we have to decide what we focus our energies on. And currently in GNU/Linux we are focusing our work on snap packages.

We know, snap has many problems. Packages often don’t work well in distros not based on debian ( #272, #77). It’s a centralized platform, controlled by one commercial entity and not everybody agrees with their decisions.

Our primary target audience has always been the less computer-savvy users. In GNU/Linux most of them use ubuntu. That has been our main reason to focus our energies on supporting ubuntu first. And snap makes it very easy to include software in ubuntu which is convenient too. Also the most used distros around are debian based, and snap usually works well on those.

Knowing that not everybody likes snap, we produce .deb packages as well and we do our best to keep them up to date.

One of the other options we have explored is flatpack. I think its architecture is great, its security is really nice and it solves some of the problems of snap (it’s not centralized, the control is in the users, …). But flatpack is designed to containerize the applications, making it impossible to package something like a VPN, because it needs to modify the network configuration and the firewall which is by design not allowed by flatpack. So flatpack is not an option for us.

Snap does containerize as well, but this is something that you can disable when you make the snap by using the ‘classic’ mode. We do that to be able to package a VPN into snap.

From the core team we might not have the time in the near future to work on any other packages. But we will welcome any contributors. If you would like to package the VPN for your favourite package manager we’ll be really happy to help. Don’t hesitate to open an issue to discuss it there, pass by on irc or write to our mailing list.