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Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

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Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#241

Like many, I have had my fair share of frustrations with snaps. Already considering moving away from Ubuntu, but not sure where to go next. Is Debian a good option? I use Linux both personally and professionally, so while I do like to tinker with new stuff, I also need some stability. I've used rolling-release distros in the past and its something I'd like to try again. Maybe Manjaro?

I stopped using linux 6 years ago when i realized it had become a glorified desktop cuztomization software for me. Now I use Windows, and on the extremely rare occasions that I need Linux, I use WSL2. But for the most part I do everything on Windows with Powershell

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#242
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish all software could provide portable binaries. However, compiling portable binaries is hard. Not many developers have the skill.

Indeed. This seems like a tooling issue, and one that strikes me as more worthy of community attention than reinventing the package manager for the nth time.

Yes, and once we have the tooling to build portable .tar.gz application packages someone should come up with a tool to automatically upgrade them.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#243
post #238

Wow they're still pushing snaps, the project with some the worst engineering I've ever seen. - Extremely slow at doing anything, even the most basic commands. - Ridiculous auto-update mechanism (you can't even disable it wtf). - Random, nonsense limitations (why can't I open dot files and dot directories???). So terrible that for most apps that I installed with snaps I end up installing the deb version later on. What…

My favorite experience with snaps is Firefox just closing in the middle of doing something because it wanted to update, and it didn't even bother to check if I was using it first.

This happened to me on my work laptop and I immediately closed the lid and started using my personal Mac instead. Fuuuuuuuuuuck that.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#244

Like many, I have had my fair share of frustrations with snaps. Already considering moving away from Ubuntu, but not sure where to go next. Is Debian a good option? I use Linux both personally and professionally, so while I do like to tinker with new stuff, I also need some stability. I've used rolling-release distros in the past and its something I'd like to try again. Maybe Manjaro?

I've moved from Ubuntu to Fedora and it's been more stable while also being more up-to-date without rolling-release distros headaches. Strongly recommend it.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hot take: package distributors are 'fake jobs' that don't need to exist, or exist only for the make-work of packaging. Tools like flatpak, snap, appimage, containerization, etc. have made the need for adapting software to different distributions unnecessary.

Yeah, if you don't mind hugely increased start-up times, RAM usage and less curation and more crap, sure no need for package distribution. I personally do mind very much. Just the differences in startup times between apt and snap applications are huge and I would absolutely despise working with such a sluggish system. I would rather build everything myself from source if forced to.

The mass proliferation of electron and other such webpages-as-desktop-applications would seem to indicate that the average user doesn't care for any of those things.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#246

Wow they're still pushing snaps, the project with some the worst engineering I've ever seen. - Extremely slow at doing anything, even the most basic commands. - Ridiculous auto-update mechanism (you can't even disable it wtf). - Random, nonsense limitations (why can't I open dot files and dot directories???). So terrible that for most apps that I installed with snaps I end up installing the deb version later on. What…

Snaps are getting me off Desktop Ubuntu after 12 years of happily using it.

I moved to Debian 11 and recreated exactly the same quite customized GNOME desktop I had on Ubuntu 20.04. Nothing is missing except snaps.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#249
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here off Ubuntu and onto centos/fedora rpm dnf world

Glad you have something sorted out. Just interested: why not Debian? i.e. still deb based distro? I'm guessing the poster above you wants recent package versions as they went to Arch.

In my case Debian’s old package versions can often be awkward because I’m not using Linux exclusively… my macOS and Windows boxes are running latest releases of most things which can cause problems with e.g. sync features.

I usually run Fedora rather than Arch though, because in my limited experience with Arch it really doesn’t like to not be booted into for extended periods of time — if you do that the piled up updates are much more likely to break somehow or things like required config changes will slip through the cracks, whereas I have yet to experience this with Fedora.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#250
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of projects to semi-automatically produce packages for a large number of distributions starting from just a git repo of the software to package. Sure, packaging software is a bit of a thankless task, but with enough automation, packaging thousands of bits of software on every git commit should be doable by just a few volunteers.

What I would like to see is: 1) a unified database for package names (it's all unnecessarily ad-hoc right now, with different distros having different policies for capital letters, whether libraries are prefixed with "lib", whether python packages have "py" or "python" or "py3" etc... 2) a standard format for declaratively describing how to build a package. Basically, we have FreeBSD ports, Arch PKGBUILDs, Void templ…

Congrats you just invented containers :P
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