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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I don't like flatpak or snap or any of them. System libraries exist for good reason, just because your computer is stupid fast and you have enough disk for the library of Congress a couple times over doesn't mean you should run a veritable copy of your whole operating system for each program. IMO it's lazy.
Sandboxing is a different thing though, if that's the purpose then it's doing it right.
I have a ton of flatpaks which means packages are shared between them, so no it’s not lazy or a copy of the whole system. It makes a ton of sense for stability.
Updates are diff’s so downloading and updating is fast. Not entire packages.
Making every package work with only a certain version of a dependency and hoping it is stable doesn’t make a lot of sense.
You've just moved the packaging problem from distributions to app developers.
The reason you have issues is historically app developers weren't interested in packaging their application so distributions would figure it out.
If app developers want to package deb, rpm, etc.. packages it would also solve the problem.
Sure. Except you gain universal compatibility for all distros that have flatpak and aren’t building all the different package formats. Makes it much more attractive for actual developers to package since it’s only done once.
There’s no right answer here, but there are definite benefits.
I’ve had many little issues since I moved to Linux years ago, most of which would never have been an issue if flatpaks were there at the time. My experience has been better with them.
Makes it much more attractive for actual developers to package since it’s only done once.
I maintain a few apps that are included into some distributions with no participation from my side apart from tagging what I consider releases in my git repo. How is doing something only once is more attractive as not doing it at all?
Yeah, that's why Arch is almost the only distro that keeps everything installed natively. All other distros either have a troublesome workaround or only support flatpaks.
Rolling release just keeps everyone on the same pace. Yes, they break sometimes, but on the long run it just works.
As a long time Arch user, it's not perfect, but it is perfect for me.
For a long time now, if a flatpack is available and maintained, I use it.
Same. Better stability, frequent updates, no building from aur, and permission management with flat seal are great.
If you use mostly flatpaks they share packages which means they don’t take nearly as much space overall as single packages do.
Updates with only downloading diff’s is fast and works well.
I also like them just for the sake of tidiness. Some apps like Steam tend to make a big mess of dependencies all over the place, so it's nice to have that all contained in one place. It does take up more space but I have a reasonably big hard drive so it's kind of negligible for me.
I briefly considered getting into Fedora Silverblue, and I still may for this very purpose.
Quite the opposite, after fiddling with it for six months I fully uninstalled flatpak and deleted the directory to get away from the fact it kept downloading copies of nvidia drivers when I had moved to an AMD a year ago, and the drivers were locked from being manually removed even after I uninstalled all flatpak packages.
I'm an Arch user, trust me when I say I read the documentation.
After wasting hours on it I nuked it.
Damn, alright. I am starting to get the hate for it. I think I am blinded by the sheer convenience of it. Also, I am probably sleeping on more up to date repositories that gets me what I want without using flatpaks.
Linux Mint has been babying me though. I love the comfort, and cinnamon is everything I need in a DE. I will need to see what I can do.
I accept that I'm in the minority on these things, but I value simplicity really highly, and I mean "simple" as a very specific concept that's different from "easy". It can be harder to resolve library dependencies on a system where everything is installed using the native package manager and common file systems, but nothing is as "simple" as ELF binaries linking to .so files. Nested directories branching off of / is "simpler" than containers.
Do I have any practical reason for preferring things this way? Not really. There are some ancillary benefits that come from the fact that I'm old and I already know how to do more or less anything I need to do on a Unix system, and if you tell me I need to use flatseal or whatever, I'd rather just use users and groups and tools that have been fine for me for 25 years. But that's not really why I like things this way. I have no issue with embracing change when it otherwise appeals to me --I happily try new languages and tools and technology stacks all the time. What it really is is that it appeals to the part of my brain that just wants to have a nice orderly universe that fits into a smaller set of conceptual boxes. I have a conceptual box for how my OS runs software, and filling that box with lots of other smaller little different boxes for flatpack and pyenv and whatever feels worse to me.
If they solved practical problems that I needed help solving, that would be fine. I have no problem adopting something new that improves my life and then complaining about all the ways I wish they'd done it better. But this just isn't really a problem I have ever really needed much help with. I've used many Unix systems and Linux distributions as my full-time daily use systems since about 1998, and I've never really had to spend much effort on dependency resolution. I've never been hacked because I gave some software permissions it wouldn't have had in a sandbox. I don't think those problems aren't real, and if solving them for other people is a positive, then go nuts. I'm just saying that for me, they're not upsides I really want to pay anything for, and the complexity costs are higher than whatever that threshold is for me.
Your knowledge of Unix systems is incredibly powerful, and I highly respect that. You are in control of your system, which is the ultimate goal of personal computing. It is even more powerful that your mental models are reflected in your system. That is super cool, I hope to get their some day.
I am also very happy you enjoy trying out new technologies, and don't have the grumpy jadedness of just using what you always use.
For me I thoroughly enjoy learning new skills that unlocks the power of all my many computers, and put them to use. Computing should be fun and empowering, and too often people deprive themselves of fun.
ag to be honest I'm so frustrated by having to remember what package manager was used for installing which binary. I don't have time for this horse shit
I use Flatpaks for everything I can. I like how Flatpak keeps apps in a container isolated from my system. Also, Flatpaks contains every lib in every version I need for my installed apps, which means It does not rely on my system libs, and I like It, cause my system libs is to make my system works only.
Flatpaks are just the future of packaging
Great explanation and rationale for using Flatpaks! I hope others with questions see this.
I understand how people may be annoyed by the redundancy of every app packaging their own lib, but I swear those are measured in kilobytes, and people tend to be so obsessively minimalist it is a non-issue. Then again, minimalist are probably compiling their software.
I want a stable OS, but I want the latest versions of applications (programs) without messing up anything. For me flatpak and snap meet that need, but I prefer flatpak.
9/10 desktop applications I use are flatpaks. Am on Arch and even when there's an AUR for a package I'd prefer to use Flatpak. Just so I can use Flatseal to control permissions access on my applications.
I'm glad to see you've gotten a ton of feedback here, and I just wanted to add another comment in support of flatpaks and image-based computing. I've been using Linux extensively for about 15 years now, mostly Arch and Debian Sid. I've been a distro packager, and I've compiled plenty of my own apps over the years.
This past year I took Fedora Silverblue for a spin after following the project for quite some time, and I am convinced that the image-based system approach, coupled with containerized and sandboxed userspace applications, is the future of Linux for most users. It makes so much sense from nearly all perspectives; whether security, reliability, or flexibility.
Integral parts of the system are mounted read-only by default. Simple commands can rollback unwanted changes, upgrade to a new distro release, or even sideload an entirely different OS. System updates are automated, as are flatpak updates, and there is little-to-no risk to stability due to the very nature of the essentials-only system images. And if something catastrophic did happen, you're just a reboot away from rolling it back.
Consider for a moment the collective energy and time that distro package maintainers must undertake on a weekly basis. Much of it simply repeated by each distro, building the same applications over and over again. Flatpaks are built once and deployed everywhere. Think of the collective potential that could be directed elsewhere.
Couple this with containers and the choice of distro matters even less. Arch, Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora are just a keystroke away. Yes, you can run containers on any distro of course, but you don't gain any of the other ostree benefits mentioned above.
I have since moved all of my workstations to Silverblue and I don't see myself ever going back to a traditional system again. If anything, I may start automating my own image deployments, similar to Universal Blue.
Yes, flatpak as a platform still needs some work, and so does ostree, but both are evolving quickly and will only get better with time.
To others who complain about needing Flatseal...in my opinion, this is a feature to be embraced, not loathed. Sane defaults are rarely sane for everyone, and Flatseal exists to give you complete control over what an app can or cannot see and do.
Thank you for writing all this! Innovation is absolutely necessary not just in Linux, but all computing. People are comparing this to Window installs, and honestly it is probably more similar to MacOS installs. Yet, the difference is that the packages are audited by a community, and are not proprietary wildcards that might bite you in unexpected ways. Flatpaks are an options, not a replacement.
Dealing with software that does not work first try is a loathsome experience. Many people here are wearing their gray colored classes, opinions influenced by decades of tinkering, and are forgetting about the curse of knowledge.
If we want more people to adopt linux, Flatpaks absolutely help.
Lastly, saying image-based reminds my a lot about Smalltalk, which is nice. I like the idea of having hot-swappable operating systems to switch between that have all the work isolated in that image. Great for experimentation, and perhaps security.
I will definitely be checking out Fedora Silverblue. Going to download and make a VM for that now.
Probably never. They're my third option after native packages and built-from-source packages/installs either manually or using the AUR. They're convenient and the only option I tolerate of those newer package styles (Flatpak/Snap/AppImage), but seemingly having to download a new 800+MB runtime for small 32MB applications is ridiculously wasteful and I wouldn't touch them if I didn't have at least a TB of storage.
Yes, but only for apps that which I want to be on the very latest versions. One might ask why I don't use a rolling release distro, that's because I prefer a solid LTS base.
100%. I just wrote a long post surmising this somewhere, but I'm switching my 5 year old Arch install to something like Debian Stable/Testing because I use almost entirely Flatpaks for my user applications (I would do 100% of them if every app I used had a Flatpak), and it's really just a much better idea to run bleeding edge on only the stuff you care about instead of an entire system.
I'm running Ubuntu now and I'm in Snap hell.
It works well enough for some very basic apps, but for me personally, Snap has created far more problems than it has solved. With Firefox, for example, it makes it a lot harder to use some extensions, and FileBot is entirely useless without file system access (I mean, that's the entire point of the program).
I've heard Flatpak is better but my experience is somewhat limited. It could hardly be worse, though...
Each snap is mounted as its own filesystem, which is messy for several reasons (try making sense of the output of lsblk on your system). Flatpaks don't do that, though they sandbox in other ways. There really isn't a "Flatpak hell", the worst that can happen is packages that depend on different versions of the same library taking up a lot of storage space, which is a problem with snaps too.
I still prefer to rely on official repos but I do use a few Flatpaks here and there. But one of the main reasons why I don't run Ubuntu is because of Canonical's aggressive pushing of snaps.
This is exactly what flatpaks were meant to do. Simplify the program deployment across all distros
It certainly has simplified things for me! To get anything so up to date, I would need to use something like Arch or the AUR, which is fine but I find unappealing (using Arch).
AUR is also insecure. I'd rather use a Flatpak from a trustworthy source.
I personally still prefer native, but flatpak is my goto for whenever something isn't working or when the official repos are outdated.
The other day I tried to use Malt for blender but it wouldn't work on the native version because it was using the wrong version of python. The flatpak version works perfectly with Malt, but for some reason I don't feel like troubleshooting, the OptiX denoiser doesn't work.
Still though, flatpak is a welcome option and is way better than snap.
It depends. Kind of prefer Flatpaks as they are always working as expected on any distro, but some of them are giving me just too much struggle.
For example, dealing with sandboxing, or especially VSS code app. Yes, there are instructions, but then I install Golang SDK via Flatpaks the hard way (using CLI) for Go development, then having a nightmare trying to setup everything in vss code. Then how tf should I access go binary within my host terminal?
On Arch Linux I just tend to install from official repos, while the rest of apps - from Flatpaks.
Personally I don't like the way they are sandboxed, bit as long as it works I am fine.
Containerised everything is the future of computing and I think we'll look back on how we do things currently with horror!
But yes, I am slowly starting to use more contained desktop applications. Server-wise, everything I deploy is now in containers.
Nope, don't like them. Nor snaps. I find the sandbox nature annoying and many developers don't actually seem to understand it correctly anyway meaning you have to use flatseal etc. Then having to deal with some apps writing config within the sandbox and some writing it outside the sandbox...
My order of preference is generally I pick the "official" supported version as opposed to any community maintained ones. Then within that:
For convenience, it's great. The sandboxing is good as well. Flatseal is a must have for me, though.
I had fedora installed the last few years, and was digging flatpak.... until I wasn't. One day I ran out of disk space - 230 Gb of flatpak dependencies. I run a pretty slim system, so what the actual heck? Did some research, learned how to flush cached and redundant packages, shrunk my flatpak deps to.... 150 Gb
I've since been trying Endeavor
I think fedora fixed this recently
I still favor native packages, but I don't have a problem with Flatpaks. I'll use them when a program isn't available in the repo or there's a compelling reason to have a never version of an application. I'm on Debian Stable, so I'm obviously not obsessed with having the newest, shiniest version of everything.
Nope. I’ve been running Debian for the past six years after I got tired of messing with arch. I’m over my shiny new thing syndrome and am happy with old but stable software. I’ve tried some flatpaks but the only two that I use are Spotify and signal. They take a lot of space and updating is slow.
No, because the updates are in GBs and my internet is limited. I'd rather install nixos and spend time learning it than install flatpak apps.
Flatpak and Snap definitely make installation more simple. The packages come with their own dependencies so you have way less issues with conflicting dependencies. I like them when they are officially supported by the distribution or developer, but I prefer the official installations over supporting a random person making a package (not sure if this is a thing with Flatpak, but with Snaps that was definitely a thing).
Some software really benefits from not begin inside flatpak though, I had to switch back to the deb version of Visual Studio Code as the integrated console didn't have access to some software outside the package and was also logging weird errors.
I was using Flatpak and Toolbx exclusively until I discovered Nix. It's much better than using those two.