I’m wondering if a package manager like flatpak comes with any drawback or negatives. Since it just works on basically any distro. Why isn’t this just the default? It seems very convenient.
Some people don’t like it because it uses a bit more storage and can start a bit slower, (I think) they can’t be used for system packages, and I’ve also had some issues with theming
One thing I always wondered is whether libraries in memory would be duplicated or not. I have seen a lot of people talking about storage space which is cheap and shouldn’t really be the focus for desktops. But I haven’t seen anything about in memory usage.
Me neither but I if we’re considering having all but the core of the distro in Flatpacks, this policy might mean Linux becoming less accessible to more modest configurations.
Unless Flatpacks deal with it somehow like regular packages do. If two app packages contain the same library within (as opposed to packaged in a dependency), can Flatpack figure out they’re the same and share code memory between the two? For library packages with two apps depending on different versions of the same third party flatpack, does it assume the newer version can be applied to both, optimizing memory usage? If so, wouldn’t that break the premise of flatpacks?
Can I convince my autocorrect that flatpacks and flapjacks are different things?
Using flatpak on low end devices (like Linux phones), I can tell you from experience, the speed liss is noticeable. Specially for application startup. As is the resource overhead.
That’s a fairly good point. On mobile startup can be crucial because sessions are short in comparison to desktop where you have longer sessions and startup time is negligable (even the slow startup times of snaps could be ignored for e.g. a video editing session)
Low specs shouldn’t keep the community from moving into newer technology.
Precisely. I’ve been playing with Mobian on a One Plus 6 (works great) and while I really like the idea of using mostly sandboxed app much like things work on Android, right now it certainly negatively impacts the experience.
I don’t think anyone dislike this comment is really correct: When they said you can use flatseal, they are making user become security expert overnight.
Too much for anyone claim themselves “practical” “security”
I like Flatpak, especially now that it has upstream providing packages. It does not have auto updates yet as far as I know. Not a big deal, if there are important security updates in the news, it is time to check for updates.
The biggest downside is that it’s only for distributing applications with a graphical user interface. Command line utilities still need another method of distribution.
I don’t use Flatpak much, but I rarely see issues. Sometimes I see minor things like themes not quite being right, but its never been bad enough for me to spend the time to fix it.
I suppose another downside is the need to have the base runtime packages, so it could take more disk space if each app uses a different one. In practice apps will share runtimes though.
There is some drawback. The main one : app can’t communicate with each other.
Example firefox and his extension keepass. As keepass can’t communicate with firefox, you have to open both apps and switch their windows.
You can use flatseal to manage communication between apps but that’s not an easy process and may prove a security issue if you don’t understand the technical jargon.
Where in KDE are those settings? I see Flatpak permissions listed in Discover (bottom of right panel,) but you can’t change them there. Not sure where else to look. I’ve been using Flatseal but if it isn’t needed …
I think its biggest weakness is also its biggest strength: isolation. Sometimes desktop integration doesn’t work quite right. For instance, the 1password browser extension can’t integrate with the desktop app when you use flatpak firefox.
If you have an unusual setup, it can be annoying trying to give programs permissions and sometimes it just outright doesn't work. For example, I mainly game on a laptop which has a pretty small hard drive, so I tend to put most of my games on an external hard drive. Flatpak really doesn't play well with that.
can sometimess not even respect your gtk/qt theming
sandboxing/permission system can lead to you trying to figure out which directory you need to give access to when you want to save file if it wasn’t preconfigured
uses its own libraries and not system libraries, want to play the hit new AAA game with steam flatpak? get fucked it requires a mesa commit that was merged 8 hours a go and you’re stuck on 23.0.4 and can’t use the git release.
Flatpak probably has it’s specific uses like trying to use one piece of proprietary software that you don’t trust and don’t want to give it too much access to your system, or most GUI software clients having an easy way to install Discord on your Steam Deck (no terminal usage, Linux is easy yay), but native packages 99% of the time work better.
uses its own libraries and not system libraries, want to play the hit new AAA game with steam flatpak? get fucked it requires a mesa commit that was merged 8 hours a go and you’re stuck on 23.0.4 and can’t use the git release.
Can’t you just install a git snapshot of mesa in a flatpak and use that? Then it’d be an upside
The downside is having to do that manually. Kind of ruins the whole point of it. Flatpaks will remain out-dated until the maintainer has time to push it out. Forever behind.
One may notice that for every new method, the old ways stay around, possibly forever. It is not the default because there were things that worked prior to flatpak. The distros that from before flatpak have likely added the capability, but won’t likely change their default for another decade, or more.
I’ve used flatpak for a while because it’s the default ob Fedoras GUI Software Center, but I’ve recently switched back to dnf and native packages where I can.
The thing is, that I have a shitty 500GB SSD with a shitty 50Mbit Internet connection (which is closer to 30Mbit because my house still has lead cables instead of copper). So downloading 300+ MB of libraries for a 2MB Program is just not feasible for me.
It does not. Flatpak uses the full platforms, the native package manager will install the individual libraries that are needed. This is technically a flathub thing and could be implemented more granularly, but I don’t think that is going to happen.
I’ve started getting warnings about deprecated platforms but flathub is very slow to update the packages that use them (even with reports), which is unfortunate too and not something I’ve encountered in my distro repository.
Yes, of course. But afaik the idea of flatpak is, that every program has a list of libraries and versions of them that it wants. So when program X was built with libfoo version 1 and program Y needs libfoo version 2, you basically download the library twice.
When you go through the package manager, you just download the current version that’s in the repository. This can lead to problems when a program expects some functionality that has since been deprecated, but I never actually had issues with that.
Also, a lot of the libraries a flatpak downloads are already installed on the system, just in a different version, I noticed.
I’m on a home computer that I use by myself, mind you. So if something breaks, it’s just my own problem. If I were to use software in production or even just administer the computer of a tech-unsavy relative, I’d likely use flatpaks or similar for stability and security reasons.
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