Linux

I prefer Arch Linux's use of flatpaks, which is none at all ever

The issue I have with flatpaks is the size for most applications. It just doesn't make sense for me. Not that it's not useful and has it's purposes.

IDK why you're being so rage baity. Its easy to avoid flatpaks if you dont like them. Only thing I've ever found as an obstacle was adding the binaries to my PATH so I can launch it with dmenu_run. Otherwise my package manager works well enough.

Bonus points: Write a PKGBUILD that installs flatpaks to /opt and symlink out binaries as needed.

Could things like this go in linuxmemes? Memes are fun but it would be nice to keep this a place for actual information. And no, this is not a comment on what it's saying, I'm just tired of so many memes.

Enter the calm and quiet room

Pass out torches and pitchforks, guns and knives

“Snaps exist”

War erupts.

I would be, but the promise is just broken. Let's say you want to do the new cool thing and run Bazzite on your console gaming PC on your TV. Now you also want to watch videos that are any normal format these days or (GASP) HEVC like you could on an XBox. You install flatpak VLC because it "just plays everything" in your experience. Your experience is ruptured for both VLC and flatpak now. Flatpaks run on system .so's actually sometimes and installing a Flatpak doesn't mean an app "just works" like Mac or Windows...

I'm not a huge fan of Flatpaks, they're a lot harder to distribute offline versus something like AppImage. Seriously, you have to like create an offline repository, then create a bundle, and it's like 6 or 7 steps, it's honestly kind of ridiculous lol but other than that they seem fine, and they're easy enough to update (but so are apt packages)

I know some people may say "oh why do you need that", but Linux has taught me that my computer is my own, and I should be able to use it the way I want to. I shouldn't have to fight with my package manager to get it to do what I want. So I guess you could say, no I'm not really a fan of Flatpaks.

Personally, I didn't mind Snaps, but I'm getting kind of really fed up with especially for-profit companies etc so I don't like Snap that much now either.

Apt packages are nice, but the more of them you have installed, especially if you're using Ubuntu-based distros and have lots of PPAs, the more annoying upgrading your distro version can be because of all the dependencies and cross-dependencies.

AppImage tends to just work for me, as long as it's not compiled with a newer libc-bin version than the distro I'm currently using has, and I really enjoy that it's just one file I can copy and run pretty much anywhere.

I like the idea of them because I don't like dealing with dependencies changing and breaking stuff and I don't really care too much about disk space in the context of non-game desktop apps, as I don't tend to install lots of them.

That being said I absolutely hate that permissions are all over the place and flatpak doesn't ship a GUI to manage them by default, nor do you get any indication as to what permissions a program has until you try some functionality (like filesystem or camera access) only to find out it doesn't work out of the box.

Cursed solution to a cursed problem 🤷

I use SystemD binary Gentoo with Flatpaks. Sue me.

I need OBS on this new computer!

Let's install the flatpack!

V4l problems

Plugins Problems

Wayland Problems

I'm just going back to the .deb, thanks.

It's a neat concept. The distro-agnostic aspect is definitely a plus for some people but I still prefer distro-specific installation methods. The only time I would seek out the Flatpak version of a particular software is when it's the only version available.

I "grew up" with Slackware, so I definitely understand the dependency issue.

I like flatpaks (and similar) for certain "atomic" pieces of software, like makemkv. For more "basic" software, like, say, KDE, I want it installed natively.

There are merits to using flatpaks. With flatseal application, you can fine-tune the permissions given to a certain flatpak application. The best thing is restricting internet usage.

There was a few years where I pretty much only used Flatpaks because I was scared of the terminal. But now that I've learned how to use the terminal, it's so much more convenient because I can quickly update all my applications all in one place without having to open a separate app. Plus, some Flatpaks can fall really behind on software updates.

There might be a Linux userbase someday where no one other than developers actually knows how to use the terminal, because users can run everything they want without a command line, but maybe that's actually a good thing because it'll drive up how many people use a Linux distro.

With Windows and Mac, there's a shareholder incentive to enshittify. With Linux, if a distro goes bad and gets commercialized, there's always another distro people can move to, not to mention there's no financial incentive. The more people get on Linux, the less power these tech companies have. Personally, that and privacy are what drew me to Linux much more so than being able to tinker or fine-tune my experience.

I like them as an option, there are some programs like Bottles or specific game launchers that work under flatpak better than the versions available via native package manager (with Bottles in particular, you can use various built-in sandbox features via flatpak which makes things a bit more secure), but it's also a bit of a pain because it's an additional package manager you have to update separately now, or tweak if things go wrong.