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Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

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Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#531

Post by chrsw »

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.

This is what I like, as a user. When it works, and it usually does, it's pretty slick. I hear people saying it only works when things are new and fresh but when you try to install old packages or new packages on older systems, things break. I guess that's true, and that's unfortunate. But things break for me using Snap/Flatpak anyway, new or old. And I find it's easier to debug distro packages breaking than application images.

The developer experience on Linux I find is much better than Windows and macOS. But putting my 'user' hat on, the experience on Linux in general is still pretty poor, despite all the progress that's been made over the decades. And package management is one example of this. I don't think it's fair to ask users to work with a new paradigm of maintaining software, even for a "free" OS, and despite how hard it is on developers to maintain distro packages.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#532

Post by friend_and_foe »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #427
hedora wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was my last straw. I installed some 6 month old LTS release, and it had to go through a 2-5 second timeout step on the initial lookup of each new dns name. Then, it would populate a local cache, and work well until the TTL expired or whatever. Anyway, if you are looking for a noob distro, I recommend manjaro. (The AUR packages are extremely unstable, but other than that, it’s pretty competitive with what Ubuntu…

> manjaro Is Manjaro really that noob-friendly? All I know about Manjaro is that it's based on Arch, which I always understood as being the LEAST noob-friendly distro besides LFS.

Arch isn't really noob unfriendly, it just requires an intimidating procedure to begin setup, which manjaro used to just do automatically for you, that was basically it's selling point, "arch without manually installing all your software."

Now it's just adware and unstable crap, not near as bad as Ubuntu but I won't recommend Manjaro anymore.

There are several less noob friendly distributions than Arch, I'd say NixOS, Void and Alpine probably top that list. Theyre great distros but they deviate significantly from what you'd expect from mainstream Linux.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#533

Post by blacksmith_tb »

sockaddr wrote: post #259
Saris wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 also happened to me. So I decided to uninstall the snap and “apt install firefox” Guess what I got? A freaking snap. Yes, try it. I’m done with Ubuntu

Yes, I followed this procedure[1] to get a real .deb version again, which has been working fine.

1: https://fostips.com/ubuntu-21-10-two-firefox-remove-snap/

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#534

Post by tuukkah »

nightfly wrote: post #499
tuukkah wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone (Ubuntu) wants to package and distribute free software (Firefox) in their own format (Snap), the upstream maintainers (Mozilla) shouldn't hinder it no matter how bad the format is - it's not their job.

People are free to distribute Firefox however they want... Without the logo and Firefox branding. If they want to distribute it _as_ Firefox they have to meet Mozilla's conditions

Yes, Mozilla (and any other upstream maintainer who owns a trademark on free software) can set such conditions but no, it's not their job.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#535

Post by hnzix »

conor- wrote: post #430
eYrKEC2 wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me a noob if you like, but I don't like hunting down drivers. Tried to go to debian on my last dev machine upgrade, but reverted straight back to ubuntu. I may be lazy, but I really don't want to hunt down drivers. I'll try debian again next cycle.

I feel like hunting down drivers hasn't been an issue on Linux for any relatively modern machine I've run in over 10 years. If it really is something that you have had problems with, maybe try PopOS instead of Debian. The restricting non-free repos by default out of principle with Debian can sometimes get annoying when you need to install certain non-free drivers (looking at you Nvidia), but PopOS is a really well-po…

>I feel like hunting down drivers hasn't been an issue on Linux for any relatively modern machine I've run in over 10 years.

Try installing any Debian flavor on an Intel Mac. Keyboard, mouse, bluetooth, wifi drivers all incredibly hard to get working. Need to perform some voodoo extracting the drivers from a MacOS image then making them available during boot.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#536

Post by bravetraveler »

npteljes wrote: post #374
brobinson wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fedora + flatpak + everything transparently running in bubblewrap automatically has been a very nice experience. Snaps drove me off Ubuntu, and I'm glad I landed on Fedora.

Fedora drove me off twice now, because I had bad luck both times with release updates. I haven't even configured the system too much, but there were several things broken after the release upgrate, the most notable being the file manager crashing while opening. Since Fedora bumps its version twice a year, with my experience, you don't get much time to run a smooth system.

Fedora supports two releases at a time, that stability is in N-1

I try to give the new release about a month to bake

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#537

Post by Kinrany »

evol262 wrote: post #342
Kinrany wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why "power users" aren't an important user model. Arch, Gentoo, Nix, and others exist if you want to be a "power user". Otherwise, extremely naive assumptions about the amount of effort expended by distro/package maintainers hand-wave the complexity away with "duh, just put it in Jenkins." Surely distros could be based on top of Nix with carefully curated sets of packages with less effort than it takes to p…

And the advantage of doing this over letting application authors maintain their own packages and deptrees with flatpaks/appimage/whatever is...? They could be based on top of Nix. In practice, it's more likely they'd be based on top of rpm-ostree. But that doesn't do anything to close the gap between the wild west of copr/ppa/aur and "get your application accepted into mainline repos" for someone who wants to distrib…

Application authors can still maintain their own Nix packages.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#538

Post by npteljes »

bravetraveler wrote: post #536
npteljes wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fedora drove me off twice now, because I had bad luck both times with release updates. I haven't even configured the system too much, but there were several things broken after the release upgrate, the most notable being the file manager crashing while opening. Since Fedora bumps its version twice a year, with my experience, you don't get much time to run a smooth system.

Fedora supports two releases at a time, that stability is in N-1 I try to give the new release about a month to bake

Yeah, me too. I don't like to adopt early, don't have the energy, I'll just let them figure it out.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#539

Post by the_third_wave »

hnzix wrote: post #535
conor- wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like hunting down drivers hasn't been an issue on Linux for any relatively modern machine I've run in over 10 years. If it really is something that you have had problems with, maybe try PopOS instead of Debian. The restricting non-free repos by default out of principle with Debian can sometimes get annoying when you need to install certain non-free drivers (looking at you Nvidia), but PopOS is a really well-po…

>I feel like hunting down drivers hasn't been an issue on Linux for any relatively modern machine I've run in over 10 years. Try installing any Debian flavor on an Intel Mac. Keyboard, mouse, bluetooth, wifi drivers all incredibly hard to get working. Need to perform some voodoo extracting the drivers from a MacOS image then making them available during boot.

That probably depends on what vintage machine you're trying to install it on. I'm typing this on a "late 2009" 27" iMac running just that, Debian. I did not have to hunt down any drivers or slaughter any black cockerels to get things working, the only "special" thing I did was install rEFInd [1] to deal with the EFI bootloader. That's it, nothing more. A simple network install later I had Debian running on the thing, sound and network and Bluetooth and wifi and accelerated graphics and all. The "iSight" camera works, the "remote control sensor" works, I can control the screen backlight, things... just work. With 16 GB of RAM and the standard 2TB hybrid drive the thing has years of life left in it as long as I can keep the graphics card running - it has been baked in the oven once to get it back to life, no complaints from me since I got the machine for free because of the broken graphics...

[1] http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#540

Post by matheusmoreira »

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.

No. I trust distribution maintainers a lot more than I trust other developers.
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