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Flatpak is not the future (2021)

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Re: Flatpak is not the future (2021)

#141

Post by danShumway »

JohnFen wrote: post #106
danShumway wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But on the other hand, app crashes aren't something that common on linux. I mean at least on my distro Strong disagree, my experience is that app crashes are extremely common on Linux if you step outside of official repositories; I say this as someone who literally only runs Linux and nothing else. I'm not necessarily saying Windows is better but... it's not like nothing ever breaks. It's impressive how well develo…

> This is why people run games through Wine instead of using the Linux versions They do? When I have a choice between the two, I'll take the Linux version every time.

I would love to as well, if the Linux versions would boot up and run on Steam Deck. Even when I was gaming on my desktop, which is pure Arch, I remember regularly needing to edit Linux games or recompile dependencies to get them to work.

Flibitijibibo has some good commentary on when to dynamically/statically link libraries, leaning towards statically linking dependencies when possible to avoid relying on the OS too much. Coincidentally, Flibitijibibo's Linux ports are some of the few where I can just download them and be confident that they're likely going to work out of the box with zero troubleshooting.

Re: Flatpak is not the future (2021)

#142

Post by danShumway »

JohnFen wrote: post #105
danShumway wrote: post #41

This debate will never die, but while people have been complaining about it, Flatpak has quietly just become a better way to package software for end users. My criteria is that I'm a user, I don't care about what's elegant to developers -- and I have fewer problems with Flatpak than I have with non-Flatpak software. The vast majority of Flatpak problems I do have as a user come down to sandboxing permissions that I a…

> 2 years later, I have literally never gotten a GoG native Linux installer to run without problems on the Steam deck. That's actually interesting. For me, GoG's Linux installers have never given me a lick of trouble on Debian.

I suspect GoG tests mostly on Debian-based systems, probably Ubuntu and it's variants. On Arch, things get weird (at least in my experience, maybe other people have had better luck).

It's frustrating because Arch is generally more stable for me than Debian, but you can kind of see the niche status of the OS play out whenever you're working with a package that wasn't packaged by the Arch team. When developers have to maintain packages for multiple distros, my experience has been that usually the popular ones get serviced first and the niche ones get serviced last.

Re: Flatpak is not the future (2021)

#143

Post by larry-_- »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #13

Just built a new Gaming Linux PC which is intended to replace my aging Dell XPS 13 as my daily driver. Decided to go all-in on flatpaks, as I've been trying to stay away from rpm-fusion. The Steam Flatpak has been an adventure, to say the least. I added a second SSD just for games that gets automatically mounted on boot, and I gather that having the games installed somewhere outside of steam's /home/ directory was no…

If you are still having problems with launching CSGO try adding a launch option to disable it.

https://totalcsgo.com/launch-options

Re: Flatpak is not the future (2021)

#144

Post by paddim8 »

Tomte wrote: post #3

But it's the present. And a godsend. I'm using it for current Firefox, Zotero, Joplin and two or three more programs, none of which are packaged in Debian (except Firefox, but only the LTS version that doesn't work with all my extensions). Unless you can offer something better, I'll keep using it.

Or just use Arch and have almost everything in official repos (and the rest in the AUR). I have had less issues with arch than with debian, because Arch is so simple. If you want to install something, you install it, and the it's installed. One command. Always. I found that debian would break more easily because I had to mess around with unofficial repos and things like flatpak just to get basic programs. More complexity, more that can break, more reliance on 3rd parties. Arch has been rock solid.

Re: Flatpak is not the future (2021)

#145

Post by mid-kid »

delfinom wrote: post #47
phalf wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this is Hacker News where people who build things hang out. If you are fine with the state of the world and are not involved in advancing it, good for you, you can close this discussion. But many people around here are building the next things. And in that context it makes sense to think about what's the future and what's not.

You sound like every other person responsible for the rampant NIHism in Linux and the reason why the "year of the Linux desktop" is in the year 6002 at this rate.

I swear the only people going on about the "year of the linux desktop" are its detractors.

Re: Flatpak is not the future (2021)

#146

Post by c-hendricks »

JohnFen wrote: post #138
depressedpanda wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way is Flatpak being forced on you?

I didn't claim that it was. I was speaking to the more general point that ceronman was making.

Sounds a lot like appealing to emotion, since you're the one using the term forced.

Re: Flatpak is not the future (2021)

#147

Post by xp84 »

Article: > How many people on Earth will truly understand how this all works? I feel this. And I think the software industry in general seems to have decided the answer is “No one does or will, and meh, we don’t care.” This is why every mysterious issue with every OS seems unsolvable. Every app is spewing random exceptions to the logs 100 times a second because in fact it does not just work together, most things barely work and nobody cares. We don’t get to have good software that works reliably anymore.

Like my phone that turns its ring volume to 100% every few days. It’s not a rogue Shortcut, cuz Shortcuts doesn’t even have that feature (only Media volume). No one will ever know why that occurs, because no one understands the whole stack from top to bottom. And in a way that’s the best case scenario with such a walled garden controlled by one “benevolent” dictator. Using all these packaging frameworks and libraries at once, no one will ever be able to make sense of some kinds of problems, because everyone is cargo-culting some large section of this stack of complexity, because a single person couldn’t hope to make sense of everything.

Re: Flatpak is not the future (2021)

#148

Post by JustinGarrison »

lairv wrote: post #79
gumballindie wrote: post #33

Neither are snaps. The future, for regular daily use, are appimages. Much like MacOS dmgs, these are a "single" file (from an end user perspective) that you download, double click, and run. That's it. Ideally we'd see more work in this area. I am slowly trying to figure out how to automate builds for GUI apps and I am considering somehow settings up an inexpensive server to pull, package, and submit appimages to appi…

I've encountered appimages a few time and wasn't really convinced. Maybe I'm missing something but here's what I found annoying: - need to move the x.appimage somewhere in your $PATH - need to create an alias like nvim.appimage -> nvim - no way to automatically update - the application isn't listed in your application list on ubuntu On the other hand `sudo snap install nvim --classic` brings me all of the above witho…

Snap and flatpak run a daemon to integrate into your system. Appimage has an optional daemon to give you the same integration https://github.com/probonopd/go-appimage

Handles making it executable, automatic upgrades, no need to move it to your $PATH, and adds the application to your app list.

Only other thing you might want to do is symlink a friendly name for cli

Re: Flatpak is not the future (2021)

#149

Post by kaba0 »

Tomte wrote: post #3

But it's the present. And a godsend. I'm using it for current Firefox, Zotero, Joplin and two or three more programs, none of which are packaged in Debian (except Firefox, but only the LTS version that doesn't work with all my extensions). Unless you can offer something better, I'll keep using it.

Nix, NixOS. It has firefox LTS and nightly, and the other two packaged as well. You can in fact freely go back and install any combination of versions/configurations for each of these, even multiple times.

Flatpak mixes up packaging and sandboxing, these two imo should not be that close coupled. Especially that it doesn’t even solve the former properly (not sure about the latter).

Re: Flatpak is not the future (2021)

#150

Post by chronogram »

paddim8 wrote: post #144
Tomte wrote: post #3

But it's the present. And a godsend. I'm using it for current Firefox, Zotero, Joplin and two or three more programs, none of which are packaged in Debian (except Firefox, but only the LTS version that doesn't work with all my extensions). Unless you can offer something better, I'll keep using it.

Or just use Arch and have almost everything in official repos (and the rest in the AUR). I have had less issues with arch than with debian, because Arch is so simple. If you want to install something, you install it, and the it's installed. One command. Always. I found that debian would break more easily because I had to mess around with unofficial repos and things like flatpak just to get basic programs. More comple…

I've been using Arch for over a decade and never liked using the AUR. Too much vetting and building. So I use flatpak for the non-DE graphical applications now.
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