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Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

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Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#71

Post by SSLy »

necovek wrote: post #50
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…

To put things into context, snaps were created before flatpak: in a sense, RedHat wanted to go at it "alone" (or at least separately from Canonical) with xdg-app/Flatpak. These ideas were already present even before those times and outside of both RH/Canonical, so it was more of a who's committed first. Basically, Ubuntu phones were using click packages (predecessor to snaps) back in 2011 and 2012, with snapcraft shi…

snap's original sin was the moat of server being closed source and client /really/ wanting to talk only to the Canonical's instance. The latter is shared by Docker, in a way.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#72

Post by dikei »

alkonaut wrote: post #60
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.

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?

For server there's Flatcar Container Linux, which only provide just enough to run containers. Everything else is provided by the container packager.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#73

Post by qbasic_forever »

alkonaut wrote: post #60
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.

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?

Arch Linux is pretty faithful to shipping software exactly or as close as possible to as the upstream authors intended. It's on a rolling release which means you kind of get a firehose of nonstop major version updates though, whether you want them or not.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#74

Post by minimaul »

YawningAngel wrote: post #32
colonwqbang wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building apt packages isn't the issue, libraries is. Debian ships very old libraries, forcing applications to run in docker. Or bring their own copies of system libraries. Look at Arch Linux, we just write a short AUR script and the package is integrated. Once the script is written, everyone can use it. This is possible because Arch always ships recent libraries.

Conversely, `pacman -Syyuu` doesn't complete reliably without user intervention, which is far from ideal. I say this as an Arch user - the expectation that I'm going to manually attend to package upgrades in practice leads to me using outdated packages

I'm genuinely curious about this, as I see people say it a lot but it's not my experience at all.

I have an Arch Linux desktop (KDE + AMD), I update it every few days, and it's always fine.

I also have a shell VM that runs IRC etc that often isn't updated in months, and I run `pacman -Syyu` and everything works fine.

I've never had the infamous 'Arch updates are unreliable' issue. Is it certain packages that are more prone to it, or something?

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#75

Post by necovek »

necovek wrote: post #50
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…

To put things into context, snaps were created before flatpak: in a sense, RedHat wanted to go at it "alone" (or at least separately from Canonical) with xdg-app/Flatpak. These ideas were already present even before those times and outside of both RH/Canonical, so it was more of a who's committed first. Basically, Ubuntu phones were using click packages (predecessor to snaps) back in 2011 and 2012, with snapcraft shi…

And lets not forget an even more prominent example: Upstart by Canonical that RedHat replaced with Systemd.

Basically, Canonical will start at a project first, but RedHat specifically will look for ways to not join them, and start their own project instead.

Part of that is certainly due to Canonical itself, but I can't help but think a lot of it is RH making a call and then throwing more developers at something.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#76

Post by teekert »

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.

It worked fine? Did you ever apt install nextcloud-client? Then find out (after pulling your hairs out) that it doesn't work because it is some ancient (and I mean years old) version?

And this is just one example. Many devs warn you out right about package manager's versions on their websites.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#77

Post by necovek »

bantunes wrote: post #70
necovek wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put things into context, snaps were created before flatpak: in a sense, RedHat wanted to go at it "alone" (or at least separately from Canonical) with xdg-app/Flatpak. These ideas were already present even before those times and outside of both RH/Canonical, so it was more of a who's committed first. Basically, Ubuntu phones were using click packages (predecessor to snaps) back in 2011 and 2012, with snapcraft shi…

I thought flatpak was a response to Ubuntu not open-sourcing the snap store code.

Sure, but I don't think it would have been much effort to build a snap store server with the client and package format open source.

IOW, if RH wanted to "join in", there was a cheaper path forward.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#78

Post by dTal »

zorr wrote: post #56
wongarsu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original model is that software developers don't package their software for distributions at all, at best they provide helper scripts that the distribution maintainers can use to do that. That's why distributions are typically either giant volunteer-run organizations like Debian or companies like RedHat or Canonical.

The problem with that model is that it puts the burden on the distro maintainers to package every possible application for their distro. And application developers have to essentially wait for each distro to repackage their app before it becomes available on that distro. Or start messing with alternate repositories for each distro they want to support. The old model works for established software, but breaks down a l…

AppImage is not like the other two, it is fundamentally just a way to make a self-contained binary directory into a single runnable file - a way to avoid having to tell the user to extract a tarball and run a particular file inside. Convenience, nothing more. The other two define entire alternate runtimes.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#79

Post by simion314 »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #12

They could do with improving the behaviour of snaps first before removing alternatives. The updates are currently awkward as they don't seem to work if the application is running which can be a problem with something like Firefox which I have running for days at a time. It's also annoying that it's gone from using simple "apt" commands to keep the machine up-to-date, to also needing a "snap refresh". I choose to use…

I gave up on snap for Firefox, still use snap for other stuff on server. The issue I had with snap version of Firefox is that it Downloads feature is crippled.

As an example I wanted to download some pictures from a webpage , for each picture I was forced to select the destination folder because each time it defaulted to some snap related folder(I forgot).

The browser feature where it remember that downloads from site A goes in folder Fa and downloads from be go to Fb is a big time saver. I got the Firefox tar.gz file and using that/

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#80

Post by lamp987 »

londons_explore wrote: post #48
timonoko wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When your break your fancy apt-architecture beyond repair aka You have held broken packages (whatever it means), you will be very thankful for snaps and flatpaks.

Thats a bug of apt... There should be an apt fix-my-system command that just looks at the state of everything, and figures out how to get everything back towards a working system. And make sure it keeps a log of everything it did so it can be rolled back if it doesn't work as promised.

apt -f install
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