So a few popular Linux distros decided to drop a few major packages like how red hat dropped rpm packages for libreoffice in favor for the flatpak packages.
If more distros decided to drop more packages from their main repository in favor for flatpak packages, then are there any obvious concerns? From my personal experience, flatpaks didn’t work well for me. If flatpaks become mainstream and takeover the linux distros, then I might just move to Freebsd. I just want to know if there is any positives to moving away from official repositories to universal repositories.
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well if flat pack dont work try snaps and from version of ubuntu?
Please no. I don’t have enough hardware for it.
it is the present of linux
What’s flatpak
It’s a universal package manager for Linux.
It makes sense to drop them in favour of flatpaks but flatpak, snap or appimage are still not fully developed. I think that universal packaging makes sense for some (most) apps.
For core OS apps it makes sense to package them the old way but everything added like office, games, browser … it is just not sustainable.
I believe that will always be a linux distro that dont use it by default
I have also avoided flatpack and the like.
On Arch and other Arch based distros, if something isn’t in the community repo it’s extremely likely it’s in the AUR.
Of course, if you actually want to sandbox something, there’s always firejail and docker
I’d say it’s the future but it’s kind of already the norm. They’re just a lot better then system packages in a lot of ways. Predictable, one system developers have to target, portable, immutable, and system agnostic. Linux has needed this for a long time. This is similar to how apps on your phones work. Windows is going this route too, and I think OSX does it too but I don’t use that garbage os to know.
MacOS apps are sandboxed and signed by default now. The biggest problem I see with sandboxed apps is they require more disk space and ram, for example each electron app can’t leverage the same underlying WebKit engine. The real benefit is that you don’t have to worry about incompatible dependency versions wreaking havoc on your system. It’s very difficult to modify the underlying OS, which is overall a good thing for most users.
The very fact that they work like mobile apps is a reason to dislike them, honestly. At least Flatpaks aren’t total fucking crap like Snaps.
MacOS is similar but better. The sandboxing and permissions were planned and implemented long ago, and getting a new app is as simple as downloading its .app bundle and running it.
Mac OS X is based on some really good design, portability, security, and development environment. BUT some of the direction Apple has been taking for the last decade+ has made the platform less open and a lot less appealing to me (and others in my family).
I give them credit for vision that matches what some people want, and providing and experience that just works within that vision, but that vision doesn’t match what I want (or even need) from of desktop anymore.
As others have said flatpak is not just the future, it is the present of Linux. Many mainline distros have fully adopted it and many smaller community distros, especially immutable ones like blendos and vanillaos, are all in on flatpak completely abandoning native packages for containers and flatpaks. I’d say for the average non-technical user, using Flathub through gnome software or discover is as good or better than the mac AppStore. The future of apps on Linux is very bright imo. Flatpaks have already brought in way more developers than before.
I feel like there will always be some applications that will limited by being a flatpak.
Off the top of my head NeoVim comes to mind. My workflow uses libraries/config files/code from all across my home directory. I can’t imagine trying to shove everything inside a flatpak, or using flatseal to give it 10 billion permissions (at that point it may as well not be sandboxed).
Every graphical app I have installed that isn’t a basic system application included with the distro install is either in a podman container or flatpak.
I haven’t really kept up with flatpak, so maybe my view of isn’t right.
but what is your reasoning behind using flatpak for all your GUI apps instead of your distributions package manager?On the fly atomic updates (the recommended update path for DNF installed apps requires a system reboot.) Though you can do it live, doing offline upgrades is safer so you don’t replace some runtime something is using midflight.
Also, flatpaks have some system isolation and have to use flatpak portals and explicit permissions/mounts giving them less ability to negatively affect my system.
Also, Flathub just has everything that I need to run anyway, at least for GUI apps.
Seems like so. It’s far from ready though. Until it is (if it ever is…), I’ll be happy on NixOS or MacOS (if I buy a macbook).
Flatpaks are here to stay but they can exist alongside traditional packages.
Completely agree. I like the idea of Flatpaks and use them when I can but I’ve ran into issues that existed only in the Flatpak version of a program. Installing the traditional package resolved all issues.
It’s the midpoint before we ascend to enlightenment with NixOS
What is NixOS and how does it iterate on flatpak?
NixOS is a distribution built around the package manger Nix. Nix is not necessarily an iteration of Flatpak ( especially since it’s been around since 2004), but it does accomplish many of the same goals in a more robust way with fewer trade offs.
The main idea of nix is that EVERY dependency of a package is tracked, from the exact glibc version all the way up to e.g. Python packages. I am not a Nix expert, but my surface-level understanding is that this is accomplished by hashing the package and all its dependencies, very aggressively, so that even if a hot fix patch is released that doesn’t change the version number, the new package is still different (as is every package that depends on the new version). That enables Nix to be the best of all worlds as far as sharing system packages like a native dependency while assuring stability and encapsulation like a flatpak. So it ends being as fast and small as the former while being as convenient and cross-distro as the latter. There are other innovations, like declarative dependency management and perfect rollbacks, that make Nix/NixOS stand out, but the above is it’s main innovation over Flatpak and older system package managers.
The kingpin linux OS
It doesn’t iterate on Flatpak, it’s its own thing.
Describing Nix in detail would require a PHD thesis but in short it takes the concept of a version to the extreme; capturing every property about some package and encoding that into the “version”; a package bar-0.1.0 that depends on foo-1.0.0 and a package bar-0.1.0 depending on foo-1.0.0 that has been built with the same GCC but a patch applied to it are considered entirely separate. This implies that your package bar cannot accidentally depend on the wrong foo and that both can be present at the same time.
Using a functional DSL, you implicitly build up a tree of such “exact versions” of dependencies and this tree is then “realised” bottom to top.
It takes many inspirations from functional programming such as purity and immutability. The build takes place in a sandbox with no filesystem access outside the declared dependencies and not networking whatsoever and cannot be changed after the fact. This aims to ensure that a build really only depends on the paths it claims to depend on (those paths must also be “exact” versions) such that running the build again with the same inputs results in the exact same output.Again, describing Nix in detail would go beyond the scope of this comment but this approach comes with many useful properties which prevent entire classes of issues you could encounter with classical package managers such as dependency hell.
It’s not tied to NixOS either (that’s its own thing again; doing Linux system configuration management using Nix), you can install Nix packages on pretty much any Linux as it doesn’t interfere with your classical package manager. Give it a try: https://nixos.org/download.html
Our Lord and Saviour Nix
Yep, they’re the future.
