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Linux desktop leaders unite behind Flathub app store. Here's why

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Re: Linux desktop leaders unite behind Flathub app store. Here's why

#61

Post by badsectoracula »

gnulinux wrote: post #52

What are people's opinions on Flatpak vs AppImage? I use both (AppImage a lot more so than Flatpak) and I'm not well educated in their differences. I shall research it, but I'm wondering if anyone has some insight to share. Some apps I use (MuseScore) publish their own official .AppImage linux executables which work flawlessly for me, so I cannot abandon AppImage completely. Is it worth it to use both? Is it better t…

AppImage is a more localized approach to Flatpak's "bundle everything" in that instead of trying to have shared libraries across different applications (Flatpak tries to share runtimes), every set of dependencies is local to the application itself. In a way it is kinda like trying to static link everything, though of course it doesn't technically use static linking - and it is really up to the developer what "everything" means (it can still rely on stuff on the underlying OS). Also it only tries to solve the dependency problem, whereas Flatpak tries to do a bunch of other stuff.

From a "how things should be" perspective, both are bad IMO (see my other messages here), but from a purely practical perspective based on my experience with trying to use applications using them, AppImage tends to work slightly better and since it is local only to the application, it doesn't pollute the rest of the system.

If i had to choose, i'd choose none of them, but if i had to choose between the two then AppImage is by far the most preferable.

Re: Linux desktop leaders unite behind Flathub app store. Here's why

#62

Post by FengLengshun »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #22

Flatpak is great for self contained apps, but it seems problematic when it has to reach outside the sandbox. I ran into this in VSCode and with CUDA video processing filters, but I'm sure there are more examples. And thats what distro packages are for, I guess.

Yeah, which is why a lot of people in immutable distro uses distrobox. And now, it seems, Nix as well.

Re: Linux desktop leaders unite behind Flathub app store. Here's why

#63

Post by ar_lan »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #14
ar_lan wrote: post #5

What advantages does Flatpak offer over Nix? The only benefit(s) I see are: 1. Sandboxed applications (via containers?) - so applications you have don't technically have access to your home directories by default. That's sort of nice - but how many applications really warrant this overhead? 2. Possibly easier to write/package? That said, in Nix you pretty much just need to package once. I've not used Flatpak - can so…

What advantages has Nix over Flatpak? Seems to be just yet another esoteric solution for installing software? Why should one prefer it over other solutions? How well does Nix integrate packages into the system? Flatpak is integrating apps into the desktop environments. Probably just following standards, but is Nix doing this too? Are Nix-Installations portable? I use Flatpak to have the same installation on different…

> What advantages has Nix over Flatpak? Seems to be just yet another esoteric solution for installing software? Why should one prefer it over other solutions?

It's not just for installing software - I have a declarative, shared configuration for each software that works deterministically on each system I share it with (NixOS or not).

> Are Nix-Installations portable? I use Flatpak to have the same installation on different systems available, just move my SSD between them. How ell would this work with Nix?

No, but the configurations are (see earlier response), so this seems to be the same benefit here.

> How well does Nix integrate packages into the system? Flatpak is integrating apps into the desktop environments. Probably just following standards, but is Nix doing this too?

I don't exactly know how to answer this - and it's probably partially because I don't use many modern desktop environments (when on NixOS I use i3, otherwise I'm on macOS, which is a bit of a specialized usecase). So I can't really comment here.

As far as installing immutable packages accessible from the system - it does a pretty exceptional job.

Re: Linux desktop leaders unite behind Flathub app store. Here's why

#64

Post by neilv »

Flatpak seems great for users who don't understand or care about open source software platforms, other than that they don't have to pay money for it.

A contemporary app store is a spectacularly awesome middleperson business to be in -- both in revenue, and in anti-competitive power.

Re: Linux desktop leaders unite behind Flathub app store. Here's why

#65

Post by ar_lan »

lapser wrote: post #48
ar_lan wrote: post #5

What advantages does Flatpak offer over Nix? The only benefit(s) I see are: 1. Sandboxed applications (via containers?) - so applications you have don't technically have access to your home directories by default. That's sort of nice - but how many applications really warrant this overhead? 2. Possibly easier to write/package? That said, in Nix you pretty much just need to package once. I've not used Flatpak - can so…

Maybe it's because I'm naive when it comes to Nix, but so far everything Nix related I've seen requires some file configuration that no everyone is able to keep up with. Compare that to having a GUI frontend and a simple `flatpak install ..` command. Flatpak is not just easier for packagers, it's miles ahead when it comes to simplicity for end users.

Ah, this is fair. Where I view "flatpack install ..." as a negative, I do realize that most users likely view that as a positive.

Re: Linux desktop leaders unite behind Flathub app store. Here's why

#66

Post by FengLengshun »

colordrops wrote: post #7

Someone needs to slap a comprehensive GUI installer and configuration UI onto NixOS. It solves similar problems in a non-hacky way but is not easy enough for the average user.

This is being worked on by SnowflakeOS: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/snowflakeos-creating-a-gui-foc... https://github.com/vlinkz/nix-software-center

Re: Linux desktop leaders unite behind Flathub app store. Here's why

#67

Post by rewgs »

Infernal wrote: post #27
oynqr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appimages are not statically linked at all.

While not statically linked necessarily, app images do attempt to bundle dependencies such that they “just work” as self-contained executables on most Linux distros - which is what the poster above seems to care about.

Which causes the aforementioned ballooning storage issue.

Re: Linux desktop leaders unite behind Flathub app store. Here's why

#68

Post by mplanchard »

superkuh wrote: post #8
quaintdev wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think about Nix

Nix is the ultimate expression of this abandonment of the concept of a desktop distro. It doesn't even try to have system libraries. Nix gives up re: future shock. The entire OS is just containers. I'm sure it works fine if you only ever use popular software but as someone that's constantly compiling and adding little .c programs from the 'net to my bin/ having to manually create and specify the entire "system" libra…

As others have pointed out, this is wrong. You generally by default use shared versions of whatever your system libraries are, which are packaged as part of a given nix release. Software can specify other, particular versions if needed. If you need access to the shared libs or some special libs in a dev environment you can specify that in the dev environment definition, and they are then available as usual. We use this, for example, so rust libraries can compile against the standard SSL library that comes with nixpkgs.

Re: Linux desktop leaders unite behind Flathub app store. Here's why

#69

Post by adra »

gnulinux wrote: post #47
lenkite wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once the linux world moves completely to Flatpak, that would truly help languages like C++ - whose evolution and cleanliness has been tremendously crippled by being unable to have a clean ABI break.

I know this is a controversial opinion, some would strongly disagree with me, maybe most would consider me downright wrong . But as a system designer I always thoughts (by always, I mean last ~5 years since I've been thinking about this) the misery we experience with C/C++ package management is an OS problem, not a language problem. The fact that some languages roll their own package manager like pip, npm, cargo etc…

Sorry for only reading a bit at t he top, but languages often need their own library installers not because (all) OSes are failing the package deployment, but that some OSes that the language targets doesn't. It just takes one bad OS (though really it's windows/OSX) that can't have good package managers. Why do chocolaty / brew exist? Because the os vendors aren't interested in propagating software that's not making them money, direct or no.
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