Is there any way to actually show the details of a remote flatpak package without installing it first? Something similar to apt show ?
Response to “Flatpak Is Not the Future”
11–20 of 27 posts
Re: Response to “Flatpak Is Not the Future”
#12I'm always surprised to see discussions about desktop Linux software place such a heavy emphasis on the security aspect. In practice, malicious software (which is ubiquitous on other platforms in the form of adware and apps stealing personal information) is almost a non-issue on the Linux desktop platform. And I don't see it becoming a bigger issue in the future either. The desktop Linux market is too small and too f…
> How do I get my application to my users? For historical reasons, there hasn't been a good answer to this question for a long, long time
What is wrong with a binary in a tarball, like Firefox and Blender and VSCode and everyone else uses? This always seemed like a non-problem to me.
Re: Response to “Flatpak Is Not the Future”
#13> Distributions that heavily push Flatpak, like Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite, Endless OS and elementaryOS, strictly push Flatpak for applications. As a side effect, these distributions have a really small base install as well. As an example, an Endless OS install takes roughly 4.2 GB 4.2gb is a "really small base install" ????? WHAT the windows users are infecting linux, and it shows the amount of bloat these days is in…
The default install of Ubuntu is in the neighborhood of 15GB. When comparing full on general purpose desktop environment distros, 4.2GB is pretty reasonable. Obviously if you're using a hand-tuned Arch or something you can get a much smaller base install size for your needs.
Ubuntu 22.04 desktop, the normal installation with LibreOffice and other extras, is about 7.1GB for me in a VM.
Re: Response to “Flatpak Is Not the Future”
#14I'm always surprised to see discussions about desktop Linux software place such a heavy emphasis on the security aspect. In practice, malicious software (which is ubiquitous on other platforms in the form of adware and apps stealing personal information) is almost a non-issue on the Linux desktop platform. And I don't see it becoming a bigger issue in the future either. The desktop Linux market is too small and too f…
> How do I get my application to my users? For historical reasons, there hasn't been a good answer to this question for a long, long time What is wrong with a binary in a tarball, like Firefox and Blender and VSCode and everyone else uses? This always seemed like a non-problem to me.
Linker errors
Re: Response to “Flatpak Is Not the Future”
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How do I get my application to my users? For historical reasons, there hasn't been a good answer to this question for a long, long time What is wrong with a binary in a tarball, like Firefox and Blender and VSCode and everyone else uses? This always seemed like a non-problem to me.
Linker errors
Static linking.
Re: Response to “Flatpak Is Not the Future”
#16Re: Response to “Flatpak Is Not the Future”
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Static linking.
You can't statically link glibc and you shouldn't statically link openssl or libcrypto, and Linux distributions make it extremely difficult to do reliably without compiling everything from source.
You don't have to statically link everything. You should choose based on (a) if the lib has to be dynamic (eg. portability layers, crypto) (b) if the lib is widespread and has stable ABI.
Re: Response to “Flatpak Is Not the Future”
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't statically link glibc and you shouldn't statically link openssl or libcrypto, and Linux distributions make it extremely difficult to do reliably without compiling everything from source.
You don't have to statically link everything. You should choose based on (a) if the lib has to be dynamic (eg. portability layers, crypto) (b) if the lib is widespread and has stable ABI.
and now your tarball will break on an indeterminate number of linux user machines without (often extensive) manual intervention to fix .so versioning issues. That's why things like flatpak exist.
Re: Response to “Flatpak Is Not the Future”
#19> you, as an end user, see less storage visually, but data take less space on flash memories compared to hard drives as well.
This has been posted to HN so we can point and laugh, right? Because no other response is appropriate to this absolute nonsense.
Re: Response to “Flatpak Is Not the Future”
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
The default install of Ubuntu is in the neighborhood of 15GB. When comparing full on general purpose desktop environment distros, 4.2GB is pretty reasonable. Obviously if you're using a hand-tuned Arch or something you can get a much smaller base install size for your needs.
Ubuntu 22.04 desktop, the normal installation with LibreOffice and other extras, is about 7.1GB for me in a VM.
You can also start with minimal(-ish) Ubuntu Server and generally add the packages you want.