For context: I habe a PC with an 8gb SSD and I somehow need to get an app on there that only has a flatpak release
I habe a PC with an 8gb SSD
Are you using a first gen eeePC?
I think I bought one of those for 40€, 12 years ago.Its a Fujitsu futro s920, got it off ebay
Man I miss the netbooks! Loved my Mini 9
I put OSX on mine. A $200 Macbook mini was a cool project and a neat conversation piece.
Are you me? I hackintoshed mine too for a while! Was still alternating between OSX and Linux at the time.
I wish I had moved to Linux sooner. I was in IT at the time and only saw windows and OSX in the wild. Servers were all windows except for one xserve. I still to this day have no idea what that server did for that customer. My only real experience with Linux at that time was FreePBX when setting up phone systems for offices.
Thirded on the hackentosh.
I can neither confirm nor deny I got my hands on one years later and flipped it on fleBay with the Mac OS on it.
In an alternate universe, phones with a fold-out hardware keyboard and full Linux OS are common.
And you can just plug them into a docking station to get a full PC.That alternate universe is this one in 2009… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900
Everyone brazenly saying Flatpak is the best install package management system has stockholm syndrome.
Like much software, it’s great - for some situations. And ugly for others.
It is the best one for people that don’t know a lot about linux. Many people are at a loss when they read basic errors like
fatal error: <header>.h: No such file or directoryorld: cannot find -l<library>. Flatpak solves a lot of that by specifically including all of it in the installation.So ye, for non-power users, flatpak is the best package manager. It also has only one downside, which is the increased storage requirement for apps as they have to bring all of their dependencies themselves, which is okay these days as storage isn’t that expensive anymore.
And everything is better than fucking snap if we’re honest for a second.
I really don’t understand the flatpak hate. Stuff doesn’t magically work across distros, and app devs don’t usually want to debug every major one. If you’re running linux on a thinkpad from 2004, sure, it wouldn’t be the best but most people can probably afford the overhead.
Linux people tend to have very strong opinions lol. I don’t get the hate either, but I do understand why people dislike the thought of having the same library lying around multiple times. I am one of those “purists”, but that’s why I compile most things from source
Agreed. Snap is. It can do desktop and system components.
And you get the glorious security of beingwatched over by a profit-focused company and protected by a closed to proprietary server.
I miss the days when packages were only available as deb or tar.gz
Edit: /s
I don’t : )
Me neither, I really like the usability of flatpak
I only use flatpack when I need the most up to date version of a software for whatever reason.
Alternatively though, if an app has KDE library dependencies for example, it’s kinda nice to not have to install a whole other desktop system wide.
Flatpak seems to be the best choice for consistency and to have it working straight out of the box. I think Linux currently needs this because we’re getting a lot less tech-savvy Linux users nowadays. Don’t get me wrong; package managers should still be used, but how are we going to get people to change if they run into package conflicts or accidentally uninstall a wrong package?
And universal compatability. One repo, for all distros. That’s a big plus too!
That’s called having just one distro.
Great… Now, you just need to convince the big distros to do that… Easy!!!111
Well, that’s the neat part. We don’t need to do that because what Flatpak does, doesn’t matter for them. People can just install Flatpak in their system and they have access to everything. I realise for system components it’s a different story, but that’s not the use case, it’s for applications.
Edit: typo.
Thats… the point of flatpak.
Until it doesn’t work. There’s a lot of subtlety, and at some point you’ll have to match what the OS provide. Even containers are not “run absolutely anywhere” but “run mostly anywhere”.
That doesn’t change the point, of course; software that are dependent on the actual kernel/low level library to provide something will be hard to get working in unexpected situations anyway, but the “silver bullet” argument irks me.
Everything is flawed, there is no silver bullet. But again, it’s still a massive improvement over what we had previously.
It is also nice to have independent packages. Consistent user experience means a lot.
It’s useful, but it isn’t the best option for everyone, so other options should be available.
Why would you want the app devs to make that? The whole problem with distro-specific packages is having to package for multiple formats and it’s a painstaking process that really isn’t worth any amount of time investment at all. If you’re an app developer, you’d much rather just make a universal package and hope that some distro package maintainer packages your app for their distro. That’s just basic common sense…
Because Flatpaks can’t share libraries or anything. It creates a lot of bloat that doesn’t need to be there. It’s great for users that want to make sure the app will always work, but it isn’t great for being efficient.
This is just a straight up lie. Flatpaks do share libraries, both as runtimes (as seen even in the screenshot here) and through deduplication between different runtimes and runtime versions. There’s usually very little bloat, if any, especially if you use Flatpaks a lot, which you probably should, given the huge number of advantages especially with proprietary apps.
I just what to install an app. I don’t want to spend an evening figgering out how to get a PWA to install. I don’t want to consult a form or your git repository to install some package I will use once and will be patched out in the next version.
If it’s only available as a flatpak I don’t need it. 🤷
Its your call
However, Flatpak is growing in popularity so chances are that’s going to be more and more the norm. Same thing with Wayland.
Are there people who hate Wayland as well?
There are people who hate anything new.
Call it flatpak, call it wayland, call it systemd. There’s always haters.
Systemd isn’t new… (Tell that to the systemd haters who think it is still “controversial”)
Point taken though
Yes there are. Actually quite a lot. They hate it because it isn’t a perfect solution in every single case that X.Org provided but ignore the long history of vulnerabilities, bugs, and cursed workarounds present in X.Org. it is getting harder for them to hate though as most of the pain points (eg. color management and global shortcuts) are part of the standard now.
but ignore the long history of vulnerabilities, bugs, and cursed workarounds present in X.Org
You’re not wrong on the other points, but that one… you’d also have to ignore the things that got fixed in X.Org, and the things that will show up in the various wayland implementations that were fixed previously. That’s the thing when doing things from scratch, old issues shows up sometimes.
They will hate it even if Wayland is absolutely perfect in every way. It is less about Wayland and more about wanting to stand out and gate keep. They want Linux to be a small group of elite users only.
With that being said, there are still reasons to use Xorg. As of today X still has the edge in remote access and desktop sharing. I think that’s liable to change soon but for now tools like Xpra xrdp only work with X. Some desktops have things built in but those are desktop specific so I don’t see them as a general solution.
Lol kinda wild to me seeing flatpak hate as a new Linux user (running fedora with kids). Flatpaks have just worked for me and it’s been fantastic
Flatpaks work great on my laptop, but they have can have issues if you use multiple hard-drives or partitions. Especially for gaming.
whoa look at mr rich boy here with a drive that costs more than $2 on ebay
If you’re new to Linux, then your probably not familiar with the full Linux community yet. Much like in real life, online Linux spaces tend to have a very loud minority of conservatives who hate progress.
Usually you’ll see them hating on things like systemd, 64bit architectures, containers, new packaging systems (like Flatpak), immutable and experimental distros (like Nix), Wayland, “bloated” desktops like KDE or Gnome, and much more.
And just like in real life, the antidote is to not take another person’s word for it. Do your own homework/try things out yourself and arrive at your own conclusions.
I refuse to use anything that only has a flatpak.
I’ll kill an entire project because there’s no other alternative.
fuck flatpak and all others like it.
What exists that is only available as a flatpak? The source should be available at least.
I’m lazy and don’t want to build from source.
I’ve already got 30 other projects I’m building from my own sources, I don’t need another.
But it’s a delta.
you probably have thrice that in your yay/paru or emerge cache
i know what you are.
Just build from source
Flatpak is only useful in distros that lack few packages
Void Linux is the Definition of „lacks a few packages”
I agree
Build it from source them.
I actually like flatpak. The only issues I have are with GTK apps which I try not to use anymore.
What after those issues?
For me trying to make GTK softwares to looks consistent with everything else is always a pain in the ass, and don’t get me started on different GTK version themes aren’t compatible with each other, so a GTK3 software doesn’t even looks the same with another GTK software just because it use GTK4.
Honestly the problem’s even worse with Qt apps. I still haven’t figured out how to get the PrismLauncher flatpak to use my Kvantum theme, and I looked everywhere
Not using the Breeze theme even when it is applied for GTK apps. The cursor being way too big on libadwaita apps. Supposedly that last one will be fixed very soon.
Flatpak is such a cool tool, kind of sad seeing it be mainly used for barely usable bloatware like libadwaita and electron. So much unrealised potential
