Is flatpak really the future? What do ypu think are it's disadvantages.
3 months ago
I had this thought because I wanted the latest lagrange, I searched it in AUR but it was not updated. I found the Appimage on github and downloaded that, but it didnt show on the app lists/rofi, I made a .desktop file but still the app icon was missing.
I thought why not give flatpak a try ( I wasn't sure if lagrange had a flatpak ) and typed 'flatpak install lagrange' and it pulled the latest version which worked the best and needed no tinkering. 路 3 months ago
Flatpack is great - means you can get more stuff back from Ikea in the back of your car. Just pray the assembly instructions make sense ;) 路 3 months ago
But ideally everyone would be running something Arch-based and be able to get absolutely everything from the official repos and AUR ;) 路 3 months ago
I think of the major app packaging solutions, flatpak is the best. People who know what they're doing will almost always want to install from their distro's repos or even from source, but for an easy and quick way to install software it's fine. Not perfect, but fine. 路 3 months ago
But I have to say: I like app images. Why? App images give me convenience withuout the dubious security claims. 路 3 months ago
I guess someone has to point to this: https://flatkill.org/ -- Personally, I'm not a fan of Flatpak or Snaps; they try to solve a problem I don't have. I prefer the classic Linux distribution model instead, and I can install whatever else I need. Non-free apps? I don't care, honestly. 路 3 months ago
Like everything else, it comes down to preference and how much value you get out of convinence vs cost. Some people want to compile EVERYTHING from source and create a super optimized system. Some repositories are super outdated and people want the convinence of being able to install the newest version of software across multiple systems without worring about dependencies or intricate details. 路 3 months ago
As a "just works" solution its fine. I can imagine that the more serious a person takes their file system and the unix philosophy, the more they might feel that flatpaks, appimages, snaps ect are too bloated and spit in the face of how packages and programs are "supposed" to be handled. 路 3 months ago
I think it's in the right direction. But needs major improvments. If it does. I'll make user experiences on Linux much more consistant. And less headache for developers.
But until then. Things like AUR and ports and a much better option, even for devs. 路 3 months ago
Limited experience too. But the same problem as @skyjake mentions. 1) You have to rely on integrations provided by flatpak. You can't ask the distro for deps. You have to compile everything that is not on flatpak. 2) It tends to download multiple versions of the same lib. Which is understandable for API/ABI compatibility.
Ther's also other usablity issues. 3) Download apps/updates from flatpak is slow. Much slower than downloading from distro package mirror. 4) Updating is much slower than pacman.
As user, I pick the distro's package any day. As a dev. The only (and a big) appeal is that I only had to compile once, then everyone can use it. 路 3 months ago
In my somewhat limited experience the main shortcomings are 1) large disk footprint of the runtimes, and 2) the sandbox environment being a de facto platform of its own, requiring porting an app specifically to it.
The footprint issue is exacerbated by needing to have multiple versions of the runtimes installed at the same time, as apps may require different ones.
The sandbox issue is not that bad for apps that use frameworks like GTK and Qt that provide the necessary integration, but if you don't use those then it's a complication. 路 3 months ago