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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Container Registry
  4. Virtual Machine Platforms And Containers
  5. Flatpak vs rkt

Flatpak vs rkt

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

rkt
rkt
Stacks29
Followers112
Votes10
Flatpak
Flatpak
Stacks7
Followers9
Votes0

rkt vs Flatpak: What are the differences?

rkt: App Container runtime. Rocket is a cli for running App Containers. The goal of rocket is to be composable, secure, and fast; Flatpak: Build and distribute applications on Linux. It is a next-generation technology for building and distributing desktop applications on Linux.

rkt and Flatpak can be primarily classified as "Virtual Machine Platforms & Containers" tools.

Some of the features offered by rkt are:

  • Composable. All tools for downloading, installing, and running containers should be well integrated, but independent and composable.
  • Security. Isolation should be pluggable, and the crypto primitives for strong trust, image auditing and application identity should exist from day one.
  • Image distribution. Discovery of container images should be simple and facilitate a federated namespace, and distributed retrieval. This opens the possibility of alternative protocols, such as BitTorrent, and deployments to private environments without the requirement of a registry.

On the other hand, Flatpak provides the following key features:

  • Build for every distro - Create one app and distribute it to the entire Linux desktop market.
  • Stable platforms - Runtimes provide platforms of common libraries that you can depend on.
  • Consistent environments - Develop and test your application in an environment that’s identical to the one users have.

rkt is an open source tool with 8.86K GitHub stars and 847 GitHub forks. Here's a link to rkt's open source repository on GitHub.

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Detailed Comparison

rkt
rkt
Flatpak
Flatpak

Rocket is a cli for running App Containers. The goal of rocket is to be composable, secure, and fast.

It is a next-generation technology for building and distributing desktop applications on Linux

Composable. All tools for downloading, installing, and running containers should be well integrated, but independent and composable.;Security. Isolation should be pluggable, and the crypto primitives for strong trust, image auditing and application identity should exist from day one.;Image distribution. Discovery of container images should be simple and facilitate a federated namespace, and distributed retrieval. This opens the possibility of alternative protocols, such as BitTorrent, and deployments to private environments without the requirement of a registry.;Open. The format and runtime should be well-specified and developed by a community. We want independent implementations of tools to be able to run the same container consistently.
Build for every distro - Create one app and distribute it to the entire Linux desktop market.; Stable platforms - Runtimes provide platforms of common libraries that you can depend on.; Consistent environments - Develop and test your application in an environment that’s identical to the one users have.; Full control over dependencies - Flatpak makes it easy to bundle your own libraries as part of your app.; Easy build tools - Flatpak’s build tools are simple and easy to use, and come with a full set of documentation.; Future-proof builds - Flatpak apps continue to be compatible with new versions of Linux distributions.; Distribution made easy - Make your app available to a rapidly growing audience of Flatpak users, with Flathub.; An independent project - Flatpak is developed by an independent community, with no lock-in to a single vendor.
Statistics
Stacks
29
Stacks
7
Followers
112
Followers
9
Votes
10
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 5
    Security
  • 3
    Robust container portability
  • 2
    Composable containers
No community feedback yet

What are some alternatives to rkt, Flatpak?

Docker

Docker

The Docker Platform is the industry-leading container platform for continuous, high-velocity innovation, enabling organizations to seamlessly build and share any application — from legacy to what comes next — and securely run them anywhere

LXD

LXD

LXD isn't a rewrite of LXC, in fact it's building on top of LXC to provide a new, better user experience. Under the hood, LXD uses LXC through liblxc and its Go binding to create and manage the containers. It's basically an alternative to LXC's tools and distribution template system with the added features that come from being controllable over the network.

LXC

LXC

LXC is a userspace interface for the Linux kernel containment features. Through a powerful API and simple tools, it lets Linux users easily create and manage system or application containers.

Vagrant Cloud

Vagrant Cloud

Vagrant Cloud pairs with Vagrant to enable access, insight and collaboration across teams, as well as to bring exposure to community contributions and development environments.

Studio 3T

Studio 3T

It's the only MongoDB tool that provides three ways to explore data alongside powerful features like query autocompletion, polyglot code generation, a stage-by-stage aggregation query builder, import and export, SQL query support and more.

OpenVZ

OpenVZ

Virtuozzo leverages OpenVZ as its core of a virtualization solution offered by Virtuozzo company. Virtuozzo is optimized for hosters and offers hypervisor (VMs in addition to containers), distributed cloud storage, dedicated support, management tools, and easy installation.

SmartOS

SmartOS

It combines the capabilities you get from a lightweight container OS, optimized to deliver containers, with the robust security, networking and storage capabilities you’ve come to expect and depend on from a hardware hypervisor.

Clear Containers

Clear Containers

We set out to build Clear Containers by leveraging the isolation of virtual-machine technology along with the deployment benefits of containers. As part of this, we let go of the "generic PC hardware" notion traditionally associated with virtual machines; we're not going to pretend to be a standard PC that is compatible with just about any OS on the planet.

Lima

Lima

It launches Linux virtual machines with automatic file sharing, port forwarding, and containerd. It can be considered as some sort of unofficial "macOS subsystem for Linux", or "containerd for Mac". It is expected to be used on macOS hosts, but can be used on Linux hosts as well. It may work on NetBSD and Windows hosts as well.

Boxfuse

Boxfuse

It generates minimal images for your application in seconds. They boot directly on virtual hardware. There is no classic OS and no container runtime.

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