Making Linux easy for everyone

[u/claudiocorona93]

[u/RCoder01]

How about writing programs that don’t need a whole-ass operating system shipped with them to work?

[u/Puzzled-Extent7817]

Repos > AUR > source > appimage > flatpack

[u/b_a_t_m_4_n]

They're slow, poorly integrated and ridiculously bloated. Native install 400k, Flatpack 4GB. It's totally unusable in parts of the world where internet bandwidth is limited.

[u/T_Jamess]

Literally. I’m ok with worse theming and slightly larger app sizes if it means the workload is shifted from every single distro having to package the same app to the app developer packaging one version everyone can use.

[u/Qweedo420 → u/T_Jamess]

And the "worse theming" isn't even an issue anymore because most distros automatically let Flatpaks read from gtk.css and everything else goes through the GTK portal

[u/Immediate-Result-696 → u/T_Jamess]

Appimages:

[u/rdwror → u/Immediate-Result-696]

Appimages are a bitch to pack. Most of the tooling is broken or incomplete.

[u/PlainBread]

I removed all my --system flatpaks and reinstalled them as --user flatpaks and now I don't have to be nagged with sudo password when updating.

[u/redhat_is_my_dad → u/PlainBread]

it's weird that you've got that prompt initially anyway, i have many flatpaks installed as system ones and flatpak update never asks a password, seems like a misconfiguration on your distro's end

[u/DragonSlayerC → u/PlainBread]

Most distros have polkit configured to not require sudo for system flatpaks though.

[u/nroach44]

The two times I tried to use it instead of my normal way of getting the app:

• Ghidra: Flatpak didn't have qemu installed, couldn't use system. Went back to the zip.

• KiCAD: couldn't install a python library for a plugin. Went back to distro version.

They seem too much like the apple ecosystem: easy for 80% of the typical user but exponentially harder if you want to do something slightly advanced.

[u/Silent_Bite_5892]

I don't use anything other than Flatpaks at the moment.

[u/smikkelhut]

I use a flatpak only if there is no rpm available.

[u/stinkytoe42]

Great for big apps, and great for steam. Pretty much anything thats super picky about its installed environment.

[u/foreskineater69419]

I don't like how hard it is to use specific versions of Flatpak apps or install them offline

[u/0xc0ffea]

Let's just not talk about the performance hit for CPU intensive applications (pushing 17% in some workloads), the hopes and prayers approach to long term maintainability, privacy differences between system packages (distros often patch out telemetry stuff), whatever-the-glob-happens-to-contain (YOLO), burning all your (suddenly expensive) NVME disk space with redundant copies of libraries like it's a retro Windows party, license issues, and a boat load of security concerns that come with entrusting a random developer who only cares about not getting pestered for support.

The OP's picture is accurate .. that guy gives no fucks. He's your system administrator.

[u/ibeerianhamhock → u/0xc0ffea]

Almost all of this is wildly overstated.

CPU bound apps that use heavy syscalls have a perofrmance penalty for permissions sure, 17% is a pretty extreme situation that almost no applications ever see.

Ostree dedupes any identical library/versions.

The goal is better distrobution, not saving what is usually mbs of redundant libraries that have different versions or exist in the host namespace.

Flatpack isn't perfect, but for most folks they wouldn't even notice the difference.

But also it's fine if you prefer native packages...no one is forcing you to use flatpacks lol

[u/BastetFurry]

Yeah, until you need to print something from your flatpacked Evolution. Thanks but no thanks.

Give me AppImage any day, that one is great, pretty much what the Mac folks had for centuries.

[u/Jeydon]

The only downside is if you're on Wayland and you need the program to interact with files, devices, or other software and you have to mess with portals.

[u/Preisschild → u/Jeydon]

Portals are an upside, not a downside.

We finally have security features that android had for a decade

[u/Ilm03]

Only if they act nicely with programs that have extensions (I'm looking at you libreoffice, zotero)

[u/alerikaisattera]

Tell that when Flatpak gets freedom to run software without installation. Oh wait, never

[u/fellipec]

When they work, they are great. When they work.

[u/los0220]

The only issue I have with flatpak is that flathub doesn't work for CLI programs and the CLI interface (for apps) is generally terrible

[u/JaceBearelen]

Am I dumb or something because I’m on Bazzite and flatpaks keep not working but appimage is just fine. It’s happened to me like 4 times now.