Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 624 posts

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#331

Post by gtaylor »

CalRobert wrote: post #165
wilonth wrote: post #161

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.

Same. Just moved to Fedora about 6 months ago and have pleasantly surprised. Works better on my laptop as well.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#332

Post by vetinari »

mestelan wrote: post #274
vetinari wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We get it that deb and rpm are a hassle to learn and write, They solve problems that arch/pacman didn't start even thinking about. Like reliably updating an installation, that wasn't kept in a tight loop with the upstream repo. > false dichotomy to say snap or flatpak are the only alternative we are slowly moving into the world of immutable base systems, like fedora silverblue for example. The last thing you want i…

silverblue ;-)

you are right, brainfart ;)

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#333

Post by account42 »

creshal wrote: post #114
alkonaut wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a distribution (or whatever one would call it - a Linux) where the aim is to not be managing the whole end-user system of OS+Apps, but just the OS. E.g. similar to Windows, or Android?

No distribution forces you to use package managers for everything. Even before flatpak/snap, distributing (especially commercial) software as just archives or executable installers was/is perfectly possible. The caveat is, there's no common baseline for libraries. Graphics libraries, the libc itself, GUI widget libraries etc. will appear in different version combinations in different distributions, since they have di…

> they have a higher risk of breaking due to incompatibilities (kernel interface for your graphics driver changed, configuration file syntax for your font renderer changed, etc.)

Simply don't vendor glibc and graphics drivers and you will be fine. Vendoring drivers doesn't make sense anyway as your application will be obsolete by the next HW cycle.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#334

Post by 7speter »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #265
lumb63 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canonical seems to be trying to push users off of Ubuntu. I switched to Arch from Ubuntu about 6 years ago after seeing how aggressively Ubuntu would auto-update, and because of Zeitgeist. I would never look back. Arch is customizable, simple (in the sense that there are no surprises; things work as expected), and has a great community. Folks here can argue about snaps or flatpaks, and I can happily use AUR to instal…

I also switched to arch for a bit, but then I was left with an unbootable system after the arch devs shipped grub's master branch as stable. The arch devs were completely unapologetic and told me 'well maybe you shouldn't use arch if you can't recover a system who won't boot' Immediately formatted and switched to pop OS and I've never been happier.

Gnome keeps me off of pop. I look forward to the popos team are ready to ship cosmic as the default desktop.

Have you tried OpenSuse Tumbleweed or Gecko Linux? Tumbleweed is a rolling distro but the maintainers apparently test all of the updates they push. OpenSuse can feel a but clunky (it asks for passwords for “everything” for instance), but theres Gecko, which acts a bit as a wrapper of a distro to make OpenSuse a bit more user friendly.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#335

Post by evol262 »

tinus_hn wrote: post #135
evol262 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Snaps/Flatpacks/other binary-containerised stuff is one of the major reasons why I abandoned Linux distributions after 22-odd years (1999-2022), and am now a happy Apple user (the other one being abandoning X11 in favour of Wayland, and a switch to laptop-first usage, on which Linux still has horrible power-consumption). Flatpaks/Snaps are almost exactly the same, conceptually, as apps on MacOS. Go look inside some…

Mac and iPhone apps don’t automatically update unless you tell them to. The goal of systemd is to make everyone do everything the way Lennart Poettering likes it on his personal laptop. Perhaps some of it is nice but also some of it is not nice. And his holier and smarter than thou attitude is off putting and rightly so. And don’t handwave away wasting my resources just so you can avoid work. That’s how we end up wit…

The goal of systemd as an *init system* is not the same thing as the goal of some of the systemd umbrella projects, and they shouldn't be conflated. systemd as an init system is leaps and bounds ahead of sysvinit, openrc, and upstart for distro maintainers, large scale sysadmins, etc. No more need for supervisord, random scripts to flag off and on was part of VPN connection, convoluted "meta" scripts which carefully restart 5 different services in the same order and a huge mess of shell.

That said, no, Lennart did not/does not do things that way on his personal laptop. His position is that users shouldn't need to know how to configure dnsmasq to have a local caching DNS server, that 99% of the options for dhcpcd aren't used by 99% of users (who are perfectly happy to simply get an address in a fraction of the time), that most users don't need to know how to configure /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* or /etc/network/interfaces/* for their use case.

If you do, you can disable those things. You can think this is a good opinion or a bad opinion, but at least he's pushing towards some kind of solution which isn't "RTFM". If you think his ideas are bad, propose new ones. Start a project which does it better. "Just don't change anything" is not a meaningful or productive way to design software or operating systems.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#336

Post by account42 »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #67
creshal wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of a distribution is that this job is done by the distributors, not the authors.

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.

As long as there is unavoidable software made by organizations like Mozilla that don't care for their users's choices there is an important role for distributions: To make sure what you get is what you want.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#337

Post by Nursie »

planede wrote: post #282
Nursie wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't take a .deb from Debian 11 and install it on Debian 10. I mean, you can, if you also install its dependencies. And you may end up with a weird franken-system, but you can. You can even automate it and set preferred distros with pinning, it's how people run things like hybrid testing-unstable distros.

> I mean, you can, if you also install its dependencies. You will very likely bump into conflicts. Or you you need to upgrade a lot of fundational libraries (like libc), at which point why stay on Debian 10? Backports exist for a reason.

You might, you might not!

Backports do indeed exist for a reason, I just felt like challenging “can’t”

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#338

Post by petepete »

d33 wrote: post #21
petepete wrote: post #9

Mir, Unity, now Snap. Ubuntu has a track record of wanting to go it alone. But, I'm all for competition, long may it continue. The only real negative here is that some apps will only release Snaps, others will only release Flatpaks and people will end up having to just revert to copr/AUR like before. Choosing a distro is basically choosing a DE and package manager these days anyway - a single unified packaging format…

Why do you see it as more frustrating?

For users who want to install something like Slack who realise their distro supports Flatpak but only Snap is available, it's definitely a source of frustration.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#339

Post by nightfly »

andrewshadura wrote: post #317
nightfly wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been angry at Canonical for lots of things, but no longer having native apt package for Firefox was forced by Mozilla...

Not true.

Please read https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/feature-freeze-exception-seed...

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#340

Post by Nursie »

PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #262
phkahler wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So upgrade the whole thing. It's open source so in most cases that's possible.

You're shifting more work onto distros and users that shouldn't be work in the first place, and basically preventing non-linux literate people from using their OS. If I install software on MacOS or Windows, I don't have to care if it was packaged for an older version etc, or that my distro may not package a dependency.

Maybe you should, those dependencies may contain vulnerabilities.
Post reply on HN