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Ubuntu Flavors Agree to Stop Using Flatpak

omgubuntu.co.uk

11–20 of 96 posts

Re: Ubuntu Flavors Agree to Stop Using Flatpak

#11
post #2

Interestingly, Ubuntu MATE lead at [1] saying it wasn't so much "agreeing" as it was complying with the requested change, for both them and Xubuntu. [1] https://fosstodon.org/@wimpy/109908489437633387

They also posted this in the comments on the article:

  sed -e 's/agree/comply/g'

http://disq.us/p/2t8ie09

Re: Ubuntu Flavors Agree to Stop Using Flatpak

#12
post #8

This made me even more happy to have moved to Debian 11 after 14 years of Ubuntu. Snap made me sick, then this. Not that I ever used Flatpack, apt and docker are good enough, but this is too much.

Yeah, I go back and forth between Ubuntu and Debian on various machines and I usually hardly notice the difference in terms of my day-to-day. I just have in the past treated Ubuntu as a Debian with a fancier installer and default desktop. But the push towards snap is frustrating me.

Unfortunately Ubuntu pushing Snap means that 3rd parties that would have produced debian-compatible packages before are now moving to just shipping snaps instead.

e.g. I went to install Slack the other day and saw they only have RPM and Snap options now, they removed the deb entirely from their site (but still mention it in their Linux-install instructions).

(And yeah, this could push me to the end of my 25+ years of debian usage, I could be tempted to switch over to NixOS.)

Re: Ubuntu Flavors Agree to Stop Using Flatpak

#13
post #7

Outrageous. I don't know why they'd follow Ubuntu, as long as the Canonical philosophy exists in this space, Linux will never grow an inch. I'm thankful to canonical for bringing Ubuntu where it is today but let's be honest, they've constantly been making weird decisions. Please stop and go take a look at ZorinOS, that's what a mainstream distro should look like!

Ubuntu ~always (around 12 years ago) try's to make a proprietary wallet-garden, and fail every single time. It's ridiculous and the complete wrong way to survive in the the Opensource space. The only thing they have at that point is the name Ubuntu.

Do you mean walled garden or is wallet-garden a play on words having to do with financial schemes and open source?

Re: Ubuntu Flavors Agree to Stop Using Flatpak

#14
For what's it's worth, here's some more context from a canonical employee:

>This post has been flaired "misleading title" because it implies that Ubuntu is removing support for Flatpak software.

>Instead, Ubuntu and Ubuntu flavors are focusing on a single, out-of-the-box experience for users: Ubuntu and flavors provide Debian packages and snap packages, and any deb or snap package provided in a default install has been built on the same Canonical infrastructure used to build Ubuntu itself. This sets an expectation for what users can expect Canonical and Ubuntu to support.

>Flatpak support is available in the Ubuntu repositories as an optional experience, and any user who wants to work with Flatpaks can run sudo apt install flatpak in a terminal and have full access to the tools necessary to work with Flatpaks. This is and will not be installed by default, but Ubuntu has committed to maintaining it in the universe repository.

>I was present when the flavor leads met to discuss this change (among quite a few others to unify the Ubuntu experience across flavors), and this was something that they all felt could be a positive change. It was not a requirement from Canonical. The only mandate from Canonical was that they committed to maintaining the flatpak package as an opt-in choice for users. The rest of the meeting was focused on fun things like the new Flutter-based installer and flavors coordinating what projects they were working on that could be coordinated together to maximize their efforts.

>Ubuntu cannot support third-party software, be it via source code, tarball, PPA, Flatpak, or AppImage. An out-of-the-box install will focus on Debian packages and snap packages. Tools to work with source code, tarballs, PPAs, Flatpaks, and AppImages are part of the Ubuntu repositories and are simple to enable if you wish to use them, and that's part of what makes Ubuntu adaptable for your computing needs.

>An official statement (that I provided feedback on) is available here.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/118w7hb/ubuntu_flav...

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-flavor-packaging-defau...

Which I guess makes sense, but I'm wondering how (if?) they were supporting flatpack before this announcement if Ubuntu doesn't usually support 3rd party software.

Re: Ubuntu Flavors Agree to Stop Using Flatpak

#15
post #7

Outrageous. I don't know why they'd follow Ubuntu, as long as the Canonical philosophy exists in this space, Linux will never grow an inch. I'm thankful to canonical for bringing Ubuntu where it is today but let's be honest, they've constantly been making weird decisions. Please stop and go take a look at ZorinOS, that's what a mainstream distro should look like!

Ubuntu ~always (around 12 years ago) try's to make a proprietary wallet-garden, and fail every single time. It's ridiculous and the complete wrong way to survive in the the Opensource space. The only thing they have at that point is the name Ubuntu.

I see Canonical as a slightly worse Red Hat - they both do their own thing for the sake of it being theirs (NIH syndrome to the max), Canonical just occasionally use a proprietary component as an upsell (compared to Red Hat that rely only on an Enterprise sticker as a differentiator). But fundamentally, what exactly is the difference? Both force their newly decided stuff on everyone and all associated distros - be it systemd, podman, dnf, regardless if it's ready or not (podman is still not feature compete with docker, and has regular breaking changes making it hard to for associated tooling to keep up, but it is forced down everyone's throats regardless).

Re: Ubuntu Flavors Agree to Stop Using Flatpak

#17
post #6

A few days ago I wanted to update an Ubuntu laptop that hasn't been turned on for over a year. I had steam and brave browser installed using snap. Updating these two took as much time as updating everything else in the system (1.6Gb of downloads). Then I uninstalled brave, which took about 6-8 minutes. The laptop has NixOS today. NixOS has official GUI installer now https://nixos.org/download.html#nixos-iso

I've upgraded Arch machines after a year offline and it sounds like that was less painful.

Ubuntu has been making some interesting choices lately.

Re: Ubuntu Flavors Agree to Stop Using Flatpak

#19
post #13
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu ~always (around 12 years ago) try's to make a proprietary wallet-garden, and fail every single time. It's ridiculous and the complete wrong way to survive in the the Opensource space. The only thing they have at that point is the name Ubuntu.

Do you mean walled garden or is wallet-garden a play on words having to do with financial schemes and open source?

>is wallet-garden a play on words having to do with financial schemes and open source?

No it means a ->approximation Snapstore/Appstore

Re: Ubuntu Flavors Agree to Stop Using Flatpak

#20
As a computational biologist, I've been struggling with performance issues on Ubuntu for months, which have made it difficult to work efficiently. Despite Ubuntu's popularity in academia, R runs much slower on Ubuntu than on my personal computer running Arch. This has forced me to do my work at home, where I have better performance. It's disappointing that Ubuntu's limitations are often assumed to be universal to Linux in academia, which can be a problem for those who require a more efficient system. I've tried troubleshooting the issue, but haven't found a solution yet, but just chock it up to Ubuntu just being more and more terrible
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