recently rebased from fedora to debian, and reinstalling apps through flathub was ridiculously easy because all the settings and data were preserved in /home. also flatpaks incorporate newer mesa than what comes with debian stable, so it's an easy way to stick with a stable distro but also be up-to-date in userspace.
My experience with Flatpaks has been so stable and hassle-free that it motivated me to switch to Fedora Silverblue.
Hell yes! Feeling futuristic.
As someone who uses Linux but only kinda, what advantages does flatpack offer over installing something with the provided package manager? (In my case that's apt)
Flatpaks are my second choice when there isn't a recent enough version in the repos. They're fine but take 1. too much storage space, and 2. are usually slower
I have never considered speed. For example, it may be foolish to use flatpaks for Blender or Godot engine? Or perhaps is it the startup speed that is slow?
yes i'm talking about the startup speed. It's not as bad as snap, but noticeably slower with some apps (it can be annoying for a web browser for example)
I had fedora installed the last few years, and was digging flatpak.... until I wasn't. One day I ran out of disk space - 230 Gb of flatpak dependencies. I run a pretty slim system, so what the actual heck? Did some research, learned how to flush cached and redundant packages, shrunk my flatpak deps to.... 150 Gb
I've since been trying Endeavor
That is unreal. I had no idea it can get that bad. Makes no sense, honestly.
It was likely the build up of a few years' packages, updates, and so on, but it eventually came to a head and I had to wipe and load. Maybe it's better now, but I think I started that install around Fedora 34? So not too long ago
Unless they come up with something else that is not "Windowsfying" Linux with one-click installs... then nah, no thanks.
Yeah, it seems like all this convergence of convenience is muddying the linux waters... then again it has never been that clean.
Nope. I’ve been running Debian for the past six years after I got tired of messing with arch. I’m over my shiny new thing syndrome and am happy with old but stable software. I’ve tried some flatpaks but the only two that I use are Spotify and signal. They take a lot of space and updating is slow.
I agree that stability is important, perhaps paramount, in a computing system. Still, some software like Cura, improve with every release, and it is worth upgrading for every new feature.
Anyways, I have never been concerned with space. On the whole programs don't take up that much space compared to everything else I would put on my system like games. Also, I am the kind of person who wants all the software they would ever use installed on their system. I want my computer to be useful even when the internet goes out.
If you’re playing games, then latest software in terms of kernel and libraries are important. There’s a reason why valve switched to arch as a base for steamos. For my use case, I do a lot of coding in C using emacs so thing don’t really change that much. To each their own, that’s the beauty of Linux!
Nope, don't like them. Nor snaps. I find the sandbox nature annoying and many developers don't actually seem to understand it correctly anyway meaning you have to use flatseal etc. Then having to deal with some apps writing config within the sandbox and some writing it outside the sandbox...
My order of preference is generally I pick the "official" supported version as opposed to any community maintained ones. Then within that:
True. I have run into a lot of dumb issues with sandboxing, mostly in choosing a folder other than downloads for file interaction.
I have overlooked Appimage, and I will consider it. I am intrigued that you put it before native package. I had not considered using the package manager of the language it is built in, which honestly is probably the optimal way to install a package.
Alright, I have some reading to do. I love learning new ways to do things. I am glad I asked!
There is a bit more nuance to it I suppose - I like Appimages for "complicated" apps, i.e. big GUI apps like Inkscape where I prefer native packages for terminal tools. The nice thing about Appimages is that there just isn't much in the way of integration and therefore its really easy to just try something out with no risk of installing a bunch of extra dependencies and no way of breaking your system - I use Appimagelauncher for managing them but have been considering swapping to something like Appman/AM.
The other thing that sometimes puts me off of native packages is having to deal with excessive numbers of PPAs or other repos when they aren't in the main ones.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0