Fan of Flatpaks ...or Not?
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Flatpaks are good, especially compared to snap.
The future is atomic OS's like silverblue, which will make heavy use of things like flatpak.
Atomic distros are cool, and I'm sure they will only get more popular, but I don't buy the idea that they're "The" future. They have their place, but they can't really completely replace traditional distros. Not every new thing needs to kill everything that came before it.
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Former OS security here (I worked at an OS vendor who sold an OS or two and my job involved keeping it secure).
Fuck no.
Sorry if that makes you downvote, but it doesn't make them safer.
cool, thanks
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I love installing things from the CLI and prefer to only do it that way but Linux needs a single click install method for applications if it’s ever going to become a mainstream OS. The average person just wants to Google a program, hit download and install. If not that then they want to use a mobile-like App Store.
Flatpak is kind of perfect at achieving both those things
There have been GUI package managers for decades.
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Flatpaks are good, especially compared to snap.
The future is atomic OS's like silverblue, which will make heavy use of things like flatpak.
Having nails driven into my testicles is better than snap. It's not a high bar.
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They always seem to have some critical limitation. Handbrake is too slow via flatpak to work. Flatpak Zoom had no camera access. Flatpak-only Zen browser can't use passkeys. Zen browser asks to be my default browser every time I open it, even though it is and I always say yes; is this a flatpak limitation? I don't know, and I'd prefer not to have to figure it out just for some theoretical benefits and more overhead.
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I get the convenience, I really do, and works on every linux distro which is a plus, but I usually stay clear of them because of the bloat. Maybe that is a misconception on my part. I should preference that with the fact I use Arch (btw)...so AUR usually has everything I need.
FP and Electron both are brutal on limited storage, so being able to pick and choose where needed can be helpful.
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I used them for some things, but other things still don't work quite right. Take Steam for example. I do love flatpaks for testing out apps, things with really finicky dependencies, or pinning a specific version of a software that I want to continue to work in the future. However, for most things, Arch + AUR just covers all my needs without any hiccups.
To me flatpaks are sort of like NixOS. All the benefits they provide aren't something I need on a daily basis. Rolling back works just fine 99% of the time with
downgrade. I already have system backups. Despite what some articles might insist, things don't just break all the time. I'm not running untrusted software.Basically no solution is perfect, but they don't need to be. If the benefits I gain can be recreated through other methods without the tradeoffs they introduce, then I will go with that. Of course, that isn't to say they don't have their place, but sometimes I feel like some people think that "being designed from the ground up" to handle certain use cases is always better than whatever "cobbled together" thing we currently have and that isn't always the case. I'm specifically quoting those two phrases because these are the exact phrases you will hear projects using to justify their existence. In fact, I would go so far as to say that some people have outright confused modularity for "cobbled together".
One last example I want to make is that I make use of projects like the fish shell and helix editor. In these cases, I find the features they introduce to be worth the tradeoffs and work better because of being designed "from the ground up" to do what they do. However, I don't make use of immutable systems, containers such as docker, or say filesystems such as btrfs. The features they provide are not useful enough to me compared to the problems they introduce.
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On the other hand each flatpak uses >1Gb of disk where deb packages rarely require more than 100Mb
That's certainly a concern for some, but I'm using like 30 GB for all the things I've installed, which is a lot (12 (flatpak-system), 76 (flatpak-user)) but that's on a 2 TB drive, which amounts to like 1½% of the total available space. I don't think that's a bad trade.
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Having nails driven into my testicles is better than snap. It's not a high bar.
Haven't had much opportunity to use snap, what's the problem with them?
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They always seem to have some critical limitation. Handbrake is too slow via flatpak to work. Flatpak Zoom had no camera access. Flatpak-only Zen browser can't use passkeys. Zen browser asks to be my default browser every time I open it, even though it is and I always say yes; is this a flatpak limitation? I don't know, and I'd prefer not to have to figure it out just for some theoretical benefits and more overhead.
Flatpak Zoom had no camera access.
I used Flatpak Zoom for all my job interviews recently. Camera and mic worked flawlessly.
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Flatpak Zoom had no camera access.
I used Flatpak Zoom for all my job interviews recently. Camera and mic worked flawlessly.
Well that's frustrating. I may need to check that again.
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Just a conversation opener, relax. Only one here shaking a fist in the air is you.
You don't have to use a meme insulting some side to just start a conversation.
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Haven't had much opportunity to use snap, what's the problem with them?
Mostly start up time for me. It just takes the programs longer to launch.
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Former OS security here (I worked at an OS vendor who sold an OS or two and my job involved keeping it secure).
Fuck no.
Sorry if that makes you downvote, but it doesn't make them safer.
Would you mind elaborating?
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On the other hand each flatpak uses >1Gb of disk where deb packages rarely require more than 100Mb
Plus I found on my install flatpak wasn't cleaning up the flatpaks autoinstalled for older versions of nvidia drivers, they were all still listed as dependencies. Not sure who's to blame but that was taking up a few much needed GBs.
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i had a hard time getting used to them but now i love them in mint i can switch between the package version and flatpak version and usually the fp one is more updated
Mint took a while to handle flatpak decently in the update manager, and now it's a nice experience.
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I love installing things from the CLI and prefer to only do it that way but Linux needs a single click install method for applications if it’s ever going to become a mainstream OS. The average person just wants to Google a program, hit download and install. If not that then they want to use a mobile-like App Store.
Flatpak is kind of perfect at achieving both those things
I mean, just make a tiny GUI wrapper for apt. I believe that is already generally what is done.
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You don't have to use a meme insulting some side to just start a conversation.
Well, I heard that people who use flatpacks are libs. True?
Sorry, I just think it's funny that Linux users get so defensive about this stuff. You really felt insulted by this?
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Haven't had much opportunity to use snap, what's the problem with them?
Haven't had much opportunity to have nails driven into my testicles.
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Haven't had much opportunity to use snap, what's the problem with them?
For me, it's the unrenameable, unmoveable, non-hidden snap directory in my home directory's root that doesn't even follow the naming convention of the other directories in there.
