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Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

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Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#501

Post by cardanome »

Karunamon wrote: post #480
cardanome wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much weird assumptions. First of all, there is no such thing as an average user. Also, it is not relevant to the discussion. I care about what I want in a system, not what some imaginary users want. Now, we could stop there but I will play: Electron solves a real problem for developers. Writing cross-platform GUI apps is a real pain. Yes, there are native solution but ensuring the user has the exact same experienc…

> First of all, there is no such thing as an average user. Also, it is not relevant to the discussion. I care about what I want in a system, not what some imaginary users want. In which case I hope you are prepared for software to get many times worse, because the software industry doesn't give a tuppeny fuck what you want in a system, they care what sells to the lowest common denominator. And that means slow, bloate…

Debian packages are maintained by volunteers, the software industry has nothing to do with this.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#502

Post by [deleted] »

attractivechaos wrote: post #153
dTal wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Setting aside that those developers are not good team players / open source citizens, they always have the option to ship a regular tarball with everything inside, a la Blender / Firefox / VSCode / Arduino etc... I resent having to install and maintain another package manager, and another set of base runtime libraries. I won't do it. Give me standalone binaries, give me source that compiles, but don't give me a link…

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

[deleted]

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#503

Post by mulmen »

tapoxi wrote: post #166
mulmen wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if hundreds of distro maintainers don’t do it then millions of users have to do it.

No, users don't do it. The application developers do it in their CI pipelines. Application developers should be the ones building and testing the app, not distro maintainers responsible for a dozen other applications.

It’s called a distribution. Literally distributing the software. The distro deals with integrating all the packages into a single compatible system. This includes setting options to maintain system compatibility.

Packaging is not required for testing individual applications. That happens at build time and the developer writes the tests. These are not distribution specific.

The separation of concerns is very clear. If a distribution doesn’t package the code then the user is left to build the application themselves. It’s impractical that a developer would build and maintain their own packages for every flavor of every distribution.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#505

Post by l0b0 »

londons_explore wrote: post #3

Can we go back to just shipping apt packages? They worked fine, and I don't feel like having multiple types of containers and update methods and mounted image file systems really made anyone's life better.

Moving away from Debian packages would probably be better. Packaging a .deb is an absolute chore, with a bunch of tools and configuration files, while packaging for Arch or NixOS is almost trivial by comparison.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#506

Post by goodpoint »

colonwqbang wrote: post #327
goodpoint wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called stability and it's a good thing. And no, nobody is forced to use docker.

But what's the point? You install debian stable, where every library is at around 2 years old. Now you want run SomeApplication (Blender, Gimp, video games) as that's what you actually use your computer for. If you wanted to run a 2 year old version of SomeApplication, that would work just fine. Is that what you really want? Is that what most users want? If you instead install a snap/flatpack of the latest version of…

> that's what you actually use your computer for

No, you use Debian stable for servers, embedded, and anything production-related that has to be stable.

You use Debian Sid for your playground or hobbies and it will be just as up to date as every rolling distro.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#507

Post by sacnoradhq »

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…

Canonical is an expert marksman footgunner.

They take bizarre risks and insist on reinventing things badly.

Security, infrastructure ecosystem integration, and defaults that don't work with reality.

The advantage of RHEL/Cent and sometimes Fedora server-side is it's boringly-reliable. The kernel especially. For development, the userland isn't great and the desktop is mediocre.

Qubes is interesting for security, containerization, and running apps isolation where Fedora, Cent, and Debian (possibly Ubuntu and Windows) are all side-by-side choices as app substrates.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#508

Post by prmoustache »

ranger207 wrote: post #385
prmoustache wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

History has shown that application developers are very bad at releasing good deliverable without too much security holes in the packaged libraries or bad practices. And the sandboxing in flatpak is actually meant to protect users from harm done by clueless devs but it fails because devs can actually build non sandboxed flatpaks and they will do it because they don't care

History has shown that distro maintainers aren't perfect at patching security vulnerabilities either and that sandboxing is useful regardless. It also shows that user want working software and will go through the effort of inventing new package formats like flatpak to work around distro maintainers. Maintainers now have a choice between complaining that everyone else is doing it wrong and eventually becoming irreleva…

Flatpak hasn't been invented by users but by distro maintainers.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#509

Post by entropicdrifter »

hoppyhoppy2 wrote: post #458
michaelcampbell wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Mint an ubuntu offshoot, or does it avoid the flatpak/snap issues?

Linux Mint is an Ubuntu offshoot that doesn't use Snaps but does include Flatpak support.

Not only does it include Flatpak support, but as of 21.1 it can even handle Flatpak updates through the GUI Update Manager alongside .deb packages from standard repos/PPAs.[1]

[1] https://linuxmint.com/rel_vera_cinnamon_whatsnew.php

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#510

Post by ninkendo »

doublepg23 wrote: post #298
prmoustache wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

History has shown that application developers are very bad at releasing good deliverable without too much security holes in the packaged libraries or bad practices. And the sandboxing in flatpak is actually meant to protect users from harm done by clueless devs but it fails because devs can actually build non sandboxed flatpaks and they will do it because they don't care

Why would you use software if you think the dev is too incompetent to package it?

Package it for what? There are a lot of distros. Should the dev be packaging it for every one of them? Debian, red hat, suse, arch, other more esoteric ones? Which distro versions? How many years back should they be maintaining the packages?
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