What are your thoughts on Flatpak/Flathub?
What are your thoughts on Flatpak/Flathub?
Flathub aims to be the place to get and distribute apps for Linux. It is powered by Flatpak which allows Flathub apps to run on almost any Linux distribution.
How does it stack up against traditional package management and others like AUR and Nix?
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It's the easiest solution to packaging software for Linux that doesn't mean it's good, In fact fhe way no dependencies are shared absolutely wrecks my hard drive and makes everything super long (downloading, updating, etc...).
Where it shines is security but to be honest do you really need an open source app to be in it's own secure sandbox?
I vastly prefer nix and I wish packaging stuff for it was easier.
It does share dependencies, but in a different way than a regular package manager. You share runtimes and base apps: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/dependencies.html
It still takes forever to update compared to more traditional package managers
I never notice any update times, as the default in Fedora is to auto-update (I think?). Everything is just always up to date.
Edit: coming from ten years of Arch, this has significantly reduced my time fixing things related to an update đ
Yeah I disabled those because my Internet is shit. I'm also on fedora and when I update, the 3 flatpak apps that I have installed take as long as my entire system to update. But I get it doesn't make much of a difference if it just happens in the background
As other have pointed out, saying that "no dependencies are shared" is a very missinformed take, given that sharing dependencies as runtimes is an integral part of Flatpak's structure. But what makes it even funnier and more obvious that you don't know what your talking about, is that you than cite Nix as something you "vastly prefer" when Nix actually deals with dependencies in a very similar way to Flatpak. From the official site:
You can have multiple versions or variants of a package installed at the same time. This is especially important when different applications have dependencies on different versions of the same package â it prevents the âDLL hellâ.
In both Flatpak and Nix, apps will only download a different version of a dependency when they need it. This ensure that, instead of breaking, the app will work the same on any system (be it an old stable Debian or a bleeding edge Arch system), without requiring devs to create monkey patches that they have to maintain as things evolve. It has the potential to immensely reduce the burden on app devs and maintainers, and make it a lot easier to make apps for Linux.