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Flatpak is not the future (2021)

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Re: Flatpak is not the future (2021)

#151

Post by kaba0 »

ceronman wrote: post #87

Flatpak seems to follow a similar path as many other Linux technologies like Wayland or Systemd, in the sense that they seem to arouse the anger of a small but very vocal crowd who really can't stand any challenge to the status quo. So this is the template of the story: There is a new tool or workflow trying to replace or complement an old one. This new tool tries to solve many different complex problems that the old…

Systemd and Wayland actually solve a real problem, and they do it well. (And I agree that they have a terribly loud and more often than not technically unfound criticism going on in each such thread)

In case of Flatpak we have a so so much better solution in the linux space (nix) that I feel that it is blindly going in the wrong direction. Package management is hard, but it finally has a solution. One might disagree with the implementation of Nix, but the idea is sound, and this is the first thing ever that doesn’t just push it a layer down, but actually solves the problem. The linux world should definitely ride this moment similarly to git’s success back then.

Re: Flatpak is not the future (2021)

#152

Post by kaba0 »

mcpackieh wrote: post #133
ceronman wrote: post #87

Flatpak seems to follow a similar path as many other Linux technologies like Wayland or Systemd, in the sense that they seem to arouse the anger of a small but very vocal crowd who really can't stand any challenge to the status quo. So this is the template of the story: There is a new tool or workflow trying to replace or complement an old one. This new tool tries to solve many different complex problems that the old…

> arouse the anger of a small but very vocal crowd who really can't stand any challenge to the status quo. This sort of narrative is common cope from developers who make substandard software. Ego blinds them to their own limitations so they blame the users. Just look at the difference between Pulseaudio and Pipewire. Pulseaudio is widely hated and the developers said it's because people just hate new things. But Pipe…

While Pipewire is certainly better than Pulseaudio, let’s not forget that the latter actually surfaced the millions of bugs in sound drivers by simply using them in a more advanced way than just putting out audio, so while it was buggy initially, most of those stem from a layer below.

Re: Flatpak is not the future (2021)

#153

Post by phalf »

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.

Sorry, I don't see how my post relates to NIHism. Could you elaborate?

Re: Flatpak is not the future (2021)

#154

Post by prmoustache »

Timber-6539 wrote: post #120
prmoustache wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Okay then, as you criticize Flatpaks give us your alternative to a trusted application. I am not criticizing, I am saying it is mostly a moot point. The sandboxing allow a bit of isolation but this it ranks quite poorly in term of actual security benefits for the typical end users use cases. > Nobody made this claim. Well, not the authors of flatpak, but yes some did. On medias that many people watch such as youtub…

> The sandboxing allow a bit of isolation but this it ranks quite poorly in term of actual security benefits for the typical end users use cases. Ranked poorly in what checklist? > Well, not the authors of flatpak, but yes some did. On medias that many people watch such as youtube videos. Let's try to stay on topic. The point I made was that, the author's example about Flatpak GIMP doing something unauthorized on you…

yes and the point I made that usually when you are using most applications that aren't fetching content from the internet, this is to work on your data, so you have to give those applications access to your data and thus if the app is malicious it can do stuff on your data. Worse is if your application needs local files and internet access, said app can exfiltrate your data, receive payload and the fact it is sandboxed to a subset of your data doesn't change a lot compared to a non sandboxed app if this is data you cannot allow to be stolen/modified/ransomwared.

Sandboxing can limit a bit the attack surface / scenarios, but that's it.

Re: Flatpak is not the future (2021)

#155

Post by biasedestimate »

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.

If "the year of the linux desktop" requires turning linux into a windows/macos clone, I am happy to postpone it.

Re: Flatpak is not the future (2021)

#156

Post by pmarreck »

sanderjd wrote: post #137
pmarreck wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core idea of Nix that has basically "solved this problem" is simply trying to control for all possible inputs to a build-time and run-time environment, and lock them all down with hashes, which is in essence basically treating a build like a pure function. (In theory, this should result in deterministic builds and deterministic runs. And in practice, nearly 100% of the time, it does.) The point of a "derivation"…

I understand why it's a great theoretical solution, but my point is that if hardly anybody is using it, then it hasn't solved the problem, because most people are still experiencing the problem. It doesn't really matter why it isn't being widely used, just that it isn't. Like, if it were the opposite, a very poor theoretical solution to the problem that is very easy to use, but nobody used it because it just didn't s…

That’s just it. Nix has been growing significantly. A third of its new users were gotten in 2022, the year after I FINALLY joined the club (after scoffing at it for... at least a decade? I was one of you, basically...).

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2022-nix-survey-results/18983

Have you worked at a startup? Do you know what a “hockey stick” growth curve looks like? Because Nix may be on the cusp of one.

Its package repo (check out search.nixos.org) has more packages that are ready to download and run than any other Linux distro, while having fewer maintainers than most distros. If nothing else, this alone speaks to the power of deterministic builds and runs. When something doesn’t randomly break, turns out that it needs much lower maintenance and thus fewer people…

The funny thing about NixOS (and I heard about this before I experienced it, which I found intriguing at the time and which I can now say is very real) is that the second you "grok" it... you will want it on ALL of your machines

So when I dove in, I said "I'm going to figure out how this works and then simplify it." Unfortunately, the closest I've come to that so far (and this is partially due to... having a 2 year old and working at a startup) is this commandline wrapper that makes most of what I need Nix to do, easy: https://github.com/pmarreck/ixnay

I still don't understand the entirety of the Nix language, but this is an excellent, excellent interactive tour: https://nixcloud.io/tour/

Re: Flatpak is not the future (2021)

#157

Post by ekianjo »

jcastro wrote: post #75
ekianjo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me again when you dont end up with 20 different versions of Nvidia drivers

Your system should be cleaning up unused runtimes. That's perhaps a distribution integration issue that should be filed and fixed?

it's not cleaning runtimes if you have 20 different flatpaks using different versions of the runtime. That's the whole weakness of this system.

Re: Flatpak is not the future (2021)

#158

Post by pmarreck »

jklinger410 wrote: post #46
pmarreck wrote: post #11

It is strange to watch everyone fight about snaps, flatpaks, silverblue ad nauseam when Nix (or its full-OS version, NixOS, or the GNU alternative, Guix) has already definitively solved this problem but is still considered too arcane for most people to use. It only uses the disk space it must, AND every app only accesses the dependencies it needs. It's the best of all worlds (except for the learning curve, which is o…

> but is still considered too arcane for most people to use. Devs can keep arguing about what the "best" solution is, but Flatpak already won this debate by its ease of use. If NIX had the same workflow as Flatpak, it would be a clear contender. I see this argument all the time with Linux, what is the best vs what is usable. With gatekeeping nerds clinging to whatever is the hardest to use, so they can feel special,…

Depends if you want the known but finite difficulty upfront, or the unknown and possibly much larger difficulty at some point in the future when you try to troubleshoot a hard problem that can't happen with a better system but you're also on some deadline which is now going to slip

Re: Flatpak is not the future (2021)

#159

Post by jeroenhd »

mcpackieh wrote: post #125
jeroenhd wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going through the effort to upgrade my 250GB system SSD because a random podcast app can't figure out how to distribute a binary without shipping half an OS. Most people aren't going to upgrade their storage at all. We're talking about Linux users here, not your run-of-the-mill generic end user. If you download an AppImage, you're most likely an advanced computer user. Maybe you don't download media yourself,…

> AppImages aren't easy to use (you can't double click them like on Windows Uh, but that's exactly how they work. What file manager are you using them that doesn't recognize them? Also you can just chmod+x them and execute them. As for their size, my XPS13 has a 250GB SSD too, not easily upgradable, but AppImages just aren't a significant burden to me. Once a month or so I move downloaded media to my NAS, but all of…

When I double click an AppImage, I get ab error ('Could Not Display "Something.AppImage"\n There is no app installed for "AppImage application bundle" files. Do you want to search for an app to open this file?'). That's in Nautilus. If I click on the file from the Firefox download thingy, it asks me how I want to open "file links" with no suggestions for what to do next. Thunar asks me to pick a program to open "AppImage application bundle" files with, but has no recommended application.

Dolphin does seem to support AppImages natively and will execute the file (after clicking through two security prompts). I guess KDE users are AppImage's target audience, then?

Re: Flatpak is not the future (2021)

#160

Post by sanderjd »

pmarreck wrote: post #156
sanderjd wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand why it's a great theoretical solution, but my point is that if hardly anybody is using it, then it hasn't solved the problem, because most people are still experiencing the problem. It doesn't really matter why it isn't being widely used, just that it isn't. Like, if it were the opposite, a very poor theoretical solution to the problem that is very easy to use, but nobody used it because it just didn't s…

That’s just it. Nix has been growing significantly. A third of its new users were gotten in 2022, the year after I FINALLY joined the club (after scoffing at it for... at least a decade? I was one of you, basically...). https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2022-nix-survey-results/18983 Have you worked at a startup? Do you know what a “hockey stick” growth curve looks like? Because Nix may be on the cusp of one. Its package…

I will be the first to applaud Nix' eventual world domination! But I'm not yet convinced it is imminent. I hope so though!
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