I’m 2 months into my Linux journey and I don’t use flatpak. I’ve had the odd problem with it. I stick to pacman and yay now.
The issue I have with flatpaks is the size for most applications. It just doesn’t make sense for me. Not that it’s not useful and has it’s purposes.
Flatpaks aim to be a middle ground between dependency hell and “let’s pull in the universe” bloat.
Applications packaged as Flatpaks can reference runtimes to share “bases” with other applications, and then provide their own libraries if they need anything bespoke on top of that.
And they are still, in my experience, slow to load, a cumbersome addition to the update process, and often un-necessary.
Don’t get me wrong, if you’re in a tight spot and can’t make two significant software packages work in a distribution due to conflicting library version requirements… some kind of lightweight container solution is attractive, expedient, and better than just not supporting one of the packages. But, my impression is that a lot of stuff has been moved into flatpak / snap / etc. just because they can. I don’t think it’s the best, or even preferred, way to maintain software - for the desktop environment.
(Returns to checking on his Docker containers full of server apps on the R-Pi farm…)
I use SystemD binary Gentoo with Flatpaks. Sue me.
Watch out we’ve got a flatass over here
Could things like this go in linuxmemes? Memes are fun but it would be nice to keep this a place for actual information. And no, this is not a comment on what it’s saying, I’m just tired of so many memes.
There was a few years where I pretty much only used Flatpaks because I was scared of the terminal. But now that I’ve learned how to use the terminal, it’s so much more convenient because I can quickly update all my applications all in one place without having to open a separate app. Plus, some Flatpaks can fall really behind on software updates.
There might be a Linux userbase someday where no one other than developers actually knows how to use the terminal, because users can run everything they want without a command line, but maybe that’s actually a good thing because it’ll drive up how many people use a Linux distro.
With Windows and Mac, there’s a shareholder incentive to enshittify. With Linux, if a distro goes bad and gets commercialized, there’s always another distro people can move to, not to mention there’s no financial incentive. The more people get on Linux, the less power these tech companies have. Personally, that and privacy are what drew me to Linux much more so than being able to tinker or fine-tune my experience.
There might be a Linux userbase someday where no one other than developers actually knows how to use the terminal, because users can run everything they want without a command line
Ideally, all the essential terminal commands could be replicated in a user-friendly GUI-applicable manner. Don’t ever have to remove the terminal for those that enjoy it, but if we could have a magic world where even the failure states could be navigated with little to no prior knowledge required and it gets everyone away from Windows and Mac for good, I’m all for it.
I’ve never had a problem with flatpaks or snaps.
I wouldn’t say I have had a problem with snaps or flatpacks either. I uninstall all snaps first thing when I install recent Ubuntu versions, and I have never messed with flatpacks, so… no problems.
I’ve never heard anyone say that Flatpaks could result in losing access to the terminal.
My only problem with Flatpaks are the lack of digital signature, neither from the repository nor the uploader. Other major package managers do use digital signatures, and Flatpaks should too.
Nah, it’s the same as with systemd, docker, immutable distros etc. Some people just don’t appreciate the added complexity for features they don’t need/use and prefer to opt out. Then the advocates come, take not using their favorite software as a personal insult and make up straw-men to ridicule and argue against. Then the less enlightened of those opting out will get defensive and let themselves get dragged into the argument. 90% that’s the way these flame wars get started and not the other way around.
For the record, I use flatpak on all my desktops, it’s great, and all of the other mentioned things in some capacity, but I get why someone might want to not use them. Let’s not make software choice a tribalism thing please. Love thy neighbor as thyself, unless they use Windows, in which case, kill the bastard. /s
I was just wondering the connection between flatpaks and the terminal because I’ve never heard of flatpaks before and Wikipedia says they’re a sandboxed package management system or something?
As someone who uses Flatpak you can still use the terminal to install, uninstall and do maintenance, not sure why people believe terminal is useless with Flatpak 😞
Flatpaks are containers, same as Snaps, I personally prefer Flatpaks over Snaps, but just my personal choice. I use Flatsweep and Flatseal apps to help administrate Flatpak apps, but use terminal as well 🙂
I’ve no real preference so long as my PC starts stuff. The reason I avoid flatpaks is because I have at some point acquired the habit of anything I install that’s not an appimage I pretty much launch from the terminal and I remember trying flatpaks and them having names like package.package.nameofapp-somethingelse and I can’t keep that in my head.
I’ve actually been discussing the idea of Flatpaks offering “terminal aliases”, similar to what Snaps do, with some people involved in Flatpak. It’s something that could happen in the future, but for now, you can totally create an alias to run a Flatpak from a single word, it’s just a PITA.
Personally I am okay with them actually. I use several on my system and having each app allowed to have different permissions is super useful.
But also I like things that are directly installed cause they seem just a tad faster performance wise.
The thing that grinds my gears is when I’m doing an apt update and then it goes off to check on the snaps and drags the process out a lot longer. It doesn’t help that they’re slower to load the apps too. Then there’s the additional attack surfaces to accumulate more CVE reports (and more out of date library versions on your system begging for a security patch…) Mostly, I just purge snap support from Ubuntu these days - but for people who don’t notice / mind such things, you do you - maybe they’ll eventually improve the lightweight container system until the rest of us don’t notice it either.
I don’t really care about all these different things, as long as none of them become a crazy confusing mess, like Windows DLLs.
The one “good” thing about containers is that you keep your DLL-like mess localized. Just one or a few related apps run in the container and if they want / need some weird library version, they can have it without breaking other things.
What’s a flatpak? Is that like a worse NixOS package? I prefer NixOS, BTW.
sandboxed application bundle installed from a flathub-compatible store or a local source (github etc)
I spent my time fighting AppImages until Canonical started to force Snap on me. I hated Snap so bad it forced me to switch distros. Now I appreciate Flatpak as a result and I don’t find AppImages all that bad, either. Also, I haven’t found myself in dependency-hell nor have I crashed my distro from unofficial Repos in well over a decade.
-It’s a long way of saying It works for me and it’s not Snap.
There’s a lot to dislike about Canonical, but snaps is still relatively easy to purge and just get on with your underlying Debian package support…
Appimages are ok, bloated but ok. Unless a library inside is old and won’t work.
Flatpak is annoying and I don’t like it at all, so I don’t use it. Easy solution.
Fuck snap though.
Flatpaks are great for situations where installing software is unnecessary complex or complicated.
I have Steam installed for some games, and since this is a 32 bits application it would install a metric shit-don of 32 bit dependencies I do not use for anything else except Steam, so I use the Flatpak version.
Or Kdenlive for video editing. Kdenlive is the only KDE software I use but when installing it, it feels like due to dependencies I also get pretty much all of the KDE desktop’s applications I do not need nor use nor want on my machine. So Flatpak it is.
And then there is software like OBS, which is known for being borderline unusable when not using the only officially supported way to use it on Linux outside of Ubuntu – which is Flatpak.
And then there is software like OBS, which is known for being borderline unusable when not using the only officially supported way to use it on Linux outside of Ubuntu – which is Flatpak.
But why is that? I mean just because it is packaged by someone else does not mean its unusable. So its not the package formats issue, but your distribution packaging it wrong. Right? In installed the Flatpak version, because they developers recommended it to me. I’m not sure why the Archlinux package should be unusable (and I don’t want to mess around with it, because I don’t know what part is unusable).
But why is that?
Because the OBS developers say so.
And since I’m not on Ubuntu, I use the Flatpak version to get OBS as intended bey the OBS developers.
So its not the package formats issue, but your distribution packaging it wrong. Right?
Exactly. Most distributions fail hard when it comes to packaging OBS correctly. The OBS devs even threatened to sue Fedora over this.
https://gitlab.com/fedora/sigs/flatpak/fedora-flatpaks/-/issues/39#note_2344970813
The quoted image does not say so, they do not say the native packaging from your distribution is borderline unusable. That judgement was added by YOU. The devs just state the package on Archlinux is not officially supported, without making a judgement (at least in the quoted image).
As for the Fedora issue, that is a completely different thing. That is also Flatpak, so its not the package format itself the issue. Fedora did package the application in Flatpak their own way and presented it as the official product. That is a complete different issue! That has nothing to do with Archlinux packaging their own native format. Archlinux never said or presented it as the official package either and it does not look like the official Flatpak version.
So where does the developers say that anything that is not their official Flatpak package is “borderline unusable”?
OBS worked pretty well for me last time I used it, using the basic package Debian provided.
Flatpaks are great for situations where installing software is unnecessary complex or complicated.
That’s my main use for flatpaks too. Add to that any and all closed source software, because you can’t trust that without a sandbox around it.
Recently I’ve moved from using flatpak for electron apps and instead have a single flatpak ungoogled chromium instance I use for PWAs.
works perfectly with my Arch Linux
btw
This is the main benefit. However, i’m finding the software I use requires less dependencies and libraries these days.
I barely even use flatpaks anymore. Almost everything is in official repos. I couldn’t tell you the last time I had a dependency conflict.
I’m not a huge fan of Flatpaks, they’re a lot harder to distribute offline versus something like AppImage. Seriously, you have to like create an offline repository, then create a bundle, and it’s like 6 or 7 steps, it’s honestly kind of ridiculous lol but other than that they seem fine, and they’re easy enough to update (but so are apt packages)
I know some people may say “oh why do you need that”, but Linux has taught me that my computer is my own, and I should be able to use it the way I want to. I shouldn’t have to fight with my package manager to get it to do what I want. So I guess you could say, no I’m not really a fan of Flatpaks.
Personally, I didn’t mind Snaps, but I’m getting kind of really fed up with especially for-profit companies etc so I don’t like Snap that much now either.
Apt packages are nice, but the more of them you have installed, especially if you’re using Ubuntu-based distros and have lots of PPAs, the more annoying upgrading your distro version can be because of all the dependencies and cross-dependencies.
AppImage tends to just work for me, as long as it’s not compiled with a newer libc-bin version than the distro I’m currently using has, and I really enjoy that it’s just one file I can copy and run pretty much anywhere.
I seem to have constant issues with AppImages. Every single one I have currently won’t open. I get an error message relating to either qT or GTK. Tried searching for the error and get a bunch of old forum threads talking about either not being compatible with Wayland at all, or comments stating that the one specific AppImage in question must have been “packaged badly”. Thankfully, nothing ‘mission critical’ for me is an AppImage currently, but it is quite upsetting that I have the most problems with the supposed “just works” app packaging/distribution option.
I have used rpms, AppImages, Flatpaks, and source. I have even used a snap or two when I had no other choice.
If you can’t work with them all, can you even say you Linux Bro?
Bro, TRUTH. I have preferences but when you gotta get something done, it doesn’t matter how the app comes bundled. I’d run .exe’s through Wine if I needed to.
If you don’t compile everything from source, you may as well get a Chromebook!
Never, ever, ever do more effort than is required.
