feddit.org

0 points

7 months ago

I still prefer traditional packages, but I get why devs of complicated graphical apps with lots of dependencies hate them. As for Flatpak specifically, I’m not super impressed. It’s just going to get more annoying over time having more old versions of all their libraries and more and more apps that aren’t updating to the latest version so they eat up a ton of drive space and give constant notices to harass the devs, but out of all the major distro agnostic options they suck the least and they’re getting better the fastest, which is why I think they’ve pretty much won at this point. I’m not currently using them, but it’s pretty much inevitable that I’ll have to at some point, and overall that’s probably more good than bad. I think AppImages could have been better if the lead dev wasn’t a walking, talking collection of weird hills to die on, but I’m afraid that ship has already sailed.

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Pantherina@feddit.de

0 points

7 months ago

I mean if the apps are not maintained, they wouldnt work well as distro packages too, would they?

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0 points

7 months ago

Not really. It’s actually pretty common for simpler, unmaintained apps to get small changes in each distro made by the distro maintainers to stay compatible with their current library versions. There’s nobody doing that on Flathub.

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Pantherina@feddit.de

0 points

7 months ago

Probably, but I guess thats the lack of “it has to be updated”. Just as distro maintainers do, flatpak maintainers or contributors can do as well, as its often pretty easy.

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0 points

7 months ago

Sure, they can, and yeah it is pretty easy, but people have lives. They move on. A distro always has someone checking to make sure things aren’t broken. On Flathub it won’t even break. It’ll just waste drive space and start giving users annoying error messages, and there if the maintainer isn’t interested in maintaining it anymore the only option for doing anything about it is to fork the whole project, and who’s going to do that for something that isn’t even really broken?

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Pantherina@feddit.de

0 points

7 months ago

you dont need to fork a project to update its manifest on github flathub. I think the packaging is very easy and accessible, in comparison to maintaining some Debian repo package etc. Also there are way more officially supported apps on Flathub, so I dont think the lack of pressure to upgrade an app is such a big problem.

But for sure, Onionshare was one of them, and different parts of the community took care of it.

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0 points

7 months ago

How exactly do you update the github of a flathub package with no one actively maintaining it? Not sarcastic. That is an actual question.

And I’m not worried about big officially supported apps. A better example of the kind of thing I’m talking about is older open source games. Flatpak could be great for games. No distro out there is maintaining a current version of every open source game that has ever been released, but Flathub can, and it could be great. Unfortunately anything that’s not being actively maintained is rapidly going to become a 200MB download that whines about security every time you update your flatpaks, even if it doesn’t connect to the internet at all. Even if it’s possible for any random person to update it, who will?

Of course, this doesn’t just have to be about games. There are lots of open source programs out there that just kind of get completed and abandoned. And that’s not even bringing up all the closed source software on flathub that definitely won’t be updated eventually. These aren’t unsolvable problems, of course, but I don’t even think anybody working on flatpak even cares.

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