For context: I habe a PC with an 8gb SSD and I somehow need to get an app on there that only has a flatpak release
Flatpak seems to be the best choice for consistency and to have it working straight out of the box. I think Linux currently needs this because we’re getting a lot less tech-savvy Linux users nowadays. Don’t get me wrong; package managers should still be used, but how are we going to get people to change if they run into package conflicts or accidentally uninstall a wrong package?
And universal compatability. One repo, for all distros. That’s a big plus too!
Until it doesn’t work. There’s a lot of subtlety, and at some point you’ll have to match what the OS provide. Even containers are not “run absolutely anywhere” but “run mostly anywhere”.
That doesn’t change the point, of course; software that are dependent on the actual kernel/low level library to provide something will be hard to get working in unexpected situations anyway, but the “silver bullet” argument irks me.
Great… Now, you just need to convince the big distros to do that… Easy!!!111
Well, that’s the neat part. We don’t need to do that because what Flatpak does, doesn’t matter for them. People can just install Flatpak in their system and they have access to everything. I realise for system components it’s a different story, but that’s not the use case, it’s for applications.
Edit: typo.
It’s useful, but it isn’t the best option for everyone, so other options should be available.
Why would you want the app devs to make that? The whole problem with distro-specific packages is having to package for multiple formats and it’s a painstaking process that really isn’t worth any amount of time investment at all. If you’re an app developer, you’d much rather just make a universal package and hope that some distro package maintainer packages your app for their distro. That’s just basic common sense…
Because Flatpaks can’t share libraries or anything. It creates a lot of bloat that doesn’t need to be there. It’s great for users that want to make sure the app will always work, but it isn’t great for being efficient.
Personally I do like the ideas behind Snap/Flatpak. I think the sandboxing is a huge deal and will improve security going forward.
In a world where space is usually the cheapest and most available hardware on a PC, I tend to agree. That being said, it’s the kind of solution that comes from engineers who put the onus on the hardware to make up for their shitty software. Engineers like me.
Yeah. Someone has to put in the work for packaging an application if you want it as a .deb/.rpm etc. package and deal with any bugs that might come up, and it’s not going to be me (speaking as a user, not a developer).
That said, I also painted myself into a corner when it comes to harddrive space. LUKS can be complicated, man …
You hate people who spend hundreds of ours of their free time developing software, who then release that software for free, under no obligation to you or anyone else, and your reasoning is because they provide it in a packaging solution you don’t find ideal?
Maybe fuck off and write your own software.
No, they hate flatpak, one of the many option to distribute software, which is not the only one even if you consider the “must run on many distro” restriction (which isn’t 100% true, kinda like the Java write once run anywhere). There are other options, some more involved, some simpler, to do so.
They didn’t say they hate devs, that’s on you, grabbing a febble occasion to tell someone that voiced his opinion to “fuck off”.
Then they should say they hate flatpak, or they are frustrated/disappointed when something they are interested in is only on flatpak.
Instead of doing that, they said they hate people who only use flatpak. Words matter, and that kind of entitlement needs to be shut down. The devs don’t owe them anything and they certainly don’t deserve hatred for their packaging solution. There are many constructive ways OP could resolve the issue. Open a feature request issue on the bug tracker, build it locally, send an email, offer to maintain another packaging method, etc.
8GB SSD
There’s your problem. The last time 8GB was plenty was in 1998.
Even cheap SD cards are larger these days. The smallest SSD you can buy in the UK right now is 250GB.
Yup. Those 64 GB SSDs many retailers put into cheap laptops already come dangerously close to violating the Geneva Convention. 8GB is just stupid, even for a Linux system.
Reading through the comments here, the Linux community slowly seems move away from “runs on about every piece of hardware you can think of” to “if you don’t have at least the Nimbus 2000 that’s on you, sucker!”
Oh lmao, I decided to look into this. https://github.com/flathub/com.ktechpit.torrhunt/blob/master/com.ktechpit.torrhunt.yaml
Looks like it just downloads the .snap package (directly from Canonical’s website) and extracts it. It’s also, of course, completely closed source so who knows what it’s doing when it’s running.
