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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

#71

Post by rewgs »

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.

The benefit of Nix is that you declaratively configure everything in a single file. And there's no reason you couldn't wrap a GUI around that. In fact I'd be surprised if someone hasn't already.

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

#72

Post by kitsunesoba »

Potentially stupid question, is there any reason a "simple" .app bundle like has been used on NeXTStep/macOS for decades wouldn't work on Linux?

That doesn't take care of sandboxing, but that seems like it'd be better handled by the OS itself rather than the package management system, and it avoids the problems with overhead and integration that come with things like Flatpak and Snap.

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

#73

Post by blendergeek »

kirbyfan64sos wrote: post #55
blendergeek wrote: post #33

I owned a Librem 5 phone and used it as my daily driver for a few months. During this time I exclusively used Flatpaks for my apps that I installed. After installing about 15-20 apps, the 32 GB of internal storage were completely full and my phone stopped working. I had no clue how huge Flatpak apps are. Even worse, I could not find out which apps to delete. All the space was taken up by excess "runtimes" I don't kno…

There should certainly be more tooling around finding these things out, but one thing worth noting is that you can `flatpak uninstall --unused` to remove old, unused runtimes (the runtime environments for apps).

Wait ... they don't get removed automatically?

Is my system is guaranteed to fill up completely if I don't run that command regularly?

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

#74

Post by superkuh »

lifty wrote: post #60
superkuh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are confusing it. Nix does not use containers.

Right. Nix is containers.

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

#76

Post by sirius87 »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #59
sirius87 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try using Flatseal [1] which is a Flatpak app that helps manage permissions for other Flatpak apps. You can see exactly what permissions are enabled in each app's sandbox and expand/override everything from env vars to filesystem locations you want to enable access to. [1] https://github.com/tchx84/Flatseal

Yeah, but "install this thing to manually tweak that thing to get those things to work" is so linux, and is exactly what Flatpak is trying to avoid. On the other hand, its a security issue, so I supposed some opt in friction is prudent.

Flatseal is only a convenience. I think you'll find that the flatpak CLI [1] has commands to do everything Flatseal does, albeit in an arguably unwieldy way.

[1] https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/flatpak-command-reference...

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

#77

Post by michaelt »

mouse_ wrote: post #12
superkuh wrote: post #2

Because they've given up on being able to maintain a desktop distro with a set of system libraries that allow you to run programs. Future shock from the too rapidly changing underlying libs and no thought of forwards compatibility longer than 3 years means no software lasts longer than 3 years, if that. And so, like a fever is a symptom of infection, we have containers as symptom of future shock. As for which contain…

Forgive me if it seems like this question comes from a place of ignorance and misunderstanding; it probably does. Why can't we just static link everything, and distribute binaries like we're on win32?

That works on Windows because Microsoft have made a commitment to doing things that way, as an intentional moat.

If you've got $$$$ of CAD software (or whatever) in binary form, which you know will work on pretty much every version of Windows but will absolutely not work on Linux or OS X - that's a good reason to stay on Windows. Microsoft is willing to do a bunch of compatibility testing etc to maintain that moat. They've got the money to pay developers to make sure Office 97 still runs on Windows 11.

Linux, on the other hand, has a lot of different stakeholders - and some of those stakeholders take the opinion that closed source software can go fuck itself. Maybe a Linux distribution wants to update from OpenSSL 1.1 to OpenSSL 3.0 and they're quite happy to patch all the software that's part of the distro. If you want to run some closed-source binary-only software from 1997 - that's between you and the software vendor, buddy.

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

#78

Post by Zurrrrr »

jmclnx wrote: post #10

Good for them :) These type of workarounds seems to point to people giving up in having secure applications, so much for the move to rust. So the path is to having applications in a walled garden. But who cares if all the plants in that garden is infested with aphids, at least they can say it won't spread. Well, time will tell on that. But, I hope application developers keep an eye on portability. There is more to th…

It's funny you mention OpenBSD and pledge/unveil, because they don't really come close enough to being able to lock down the system, while linux has things like SELinux/RSBAC available.

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

#79

Post by akvadrako »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #45
blendergeek wrote: post #33

I owned a Librem 5 phone and used it as my daily driver for a few months. During this time I exclusively used Flatpaks for my apps that I installed. After installing about 15-20 apps, the 32 GB of internal storage were completely full and my phone stopped working. I had no clue how huge Flatpak apps are. Even worse, I could not find out which apps to delete. All the space was taken up by excess "runtimes" I don't kno…

Could this be solved by smarter layering? I've read that Flatpaks are just container images under the hood and I'm sure many of those share the same base layers.

Flatpak is even better than layering. All the files are stored in OSTree, a git-like repo, and hard-linked under the root for each app. So duplicate files don't take up space.

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

#80

Post by Infernal »

rewgs wrote: post #67
Infernal wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The ballooning storage issue was mentioned along with Flatpak, and is an issue as every single dependency is pulled in. AppImage excludes those dependencies which are "reasonably expected" to be on any Linux system. See the Application Sizes section here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/866511/what-are-the-differen...

Example: LibreOffice download size (source)

  - AppImage ~248 MByte  
  - Snap      463 MByte [July 2020 update]  
  - Flatpak   543 MByte
EDIT: formatting
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