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.