So a few popular Linux distros decided to drop a few major packages like how red hat dropped rpm packages for libreoffice in favor for the flatpak packages.
If more distros decided to drop more packages from their main repository in favor for flatpak packages, then are there any obvious concerns? From my personal experience, flatpaks didn’t work well for me. If flatpaks become mainstream and takeover the linux distros, then I might just move to Freebsd. I just want to know if there is any positives to moving away from official repositories to universal repositories.
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Flatpak just sucks for us with potato level hardware. It is much slower and crashes. Some things just didn’t work until I got mine built from source using AUR scripts. I had checked the memory usage, the flatpak version of EasyEffects took much more memory than the native one. I don’t want Linux to become Windows with this Flatpak nonsense that wastes my desktop’s resources more than it should. Whenever I played music with EasyEffects flatpak, my CPU usage went up literally 80%, but with the native build, EE now does not go beyond like 5% CPU.
Any package that will force me to use Flatpak, I simply won’t use it at all, or find some workaround. I will not donate a single penny to the project itself, but I will to the one who found the workaround.
Please no. I don’t have enough hardware for it.
I don’t think the average user cares tbh. I have OpenSuSe, Fedora, Win 11, RHDesktop currently running. From an admin level though, so long as it’s well documented, transparent, and standard packages are available and maintained, I’m happy to continue to learn and be adaptable
I’m a software engineer, but when it comes to configuring and managing my OS I think I have more in common with the average user than a power user. I just want to install programs and I want them to work.
The other day I wanted to install valgrind. Should be easy, right? I’m on the latest LTS version of Xubuntu. That should be the easiest thing in the world, just sudo apt install valgrind. Lo and behold, apparently I’m in an unresolvable dependency hell.
But turns out there’s a snap version of valgrind. Worked fine!
So what am I supposed to think? People bitch about snap, even here, but it works every time for me. Flatpak is the same thing to a guy like me.
Same for me, snaps work everytime, flatpacks rarely do.
Firefox would like a word….
Forced snap+Firefox is hell
flatpak seems to be adopted by everybody who’s not directly affiliated with canonical. Which is only about half of the linux desktop space. Snaps are controversial, but I like them. Currently I’m on Ubuntu with 23.04 and snaps, they work really fine for me. Most of my VMs now use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with flatpaks though, and that works really nicely as well. ‘Normal’ users probably don’t care, so I’d say that both packaging formats will slowly replace everything else, but only snaps can form a complete system. Flatpaks cannot be used without apt/pacman/rpm/zypper/whatever. Edit: the main benefit of moving to universal repos is consistency. Flatpaks and snaps on ubuntu work exactly the same as snaps and flatpaks on arch, there are no version differences, no differences in dependencies.
The snap install I did of nextcloud on my server was sooooo painless compared to manually doing it or the AIO docker crap they have. It was a trivial install with snap. Upgrades have been easy peasy.
I only use ubuntu on my servers, but for this specific use case I’ve been very happy with the snap.
Considering the Steam Deck accounts for a huge portion of Linux installs, I think flatpaks are going to be here to start and only grow in popularity.
I have to ask though, why do people dislike flatpaks?
Flatpaks are slow and take more resources. It is only useful for the riches who can afford 16 GB+ RAM and TBs of storage.
question, just how much bigger is say flatpack version of a program over the native package? Like right now I am running steam in back ground and I have like 8 youtube video loaded to play latter. Together my browser and steam are using 6 gb of ram. Witch I believe are snaps. How much bigger and slower are looking at?
The program itself isn’t really bigger, what makes the difference is that it won’t use the dependencies installed by your native package manager, it will download them, it also will download various runtimes if needed for the program, these runtimes are not really supposed to be ran if you compile the package yourself for your distribution, but if you use Flatpak, it is going to run all these runtimes for the program to work, these runtimes will use more RAM than the native build, if the runtime is not optimised, then it will also contribute to higher use of CPU and everything else in general.
It will differ from program to program, but I’ll let you know that I have natively compiled EasyEffects (real-time audio manipulation) and also have tried the Flatpak build. The native version hardly uses more than 5% CPU, and is also lightweight in terms of RAM. But the Flatpak build took significantly more RAM usage and my CPU went 80% whenever I played music with the same preset that I tested on the native build. Flatpak also had to download 700-900 MB worth of internet (no idea how much space it took after installation) for the program to run.
As others have said flatpak is not just the future, it is the present of Linux. Many mainline distros have fully adopted it and many smaller community distros, especially immutable ones like blendos and vanillaos, are all in on flatpak completely abandoning native packages for containers and flatpaks. I’d say for the average non-technical user, using Flathub through gnome software or discover is as good or better than the mac AppStore. The future of apps on Linux is very bright imo. Flatpaks have already brought in way more developers than before.
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I’m liking them especially for long complile-time binaries that are otherwise difficult to keep up to date.
I recently installed Manjaro, and tried to install VSC.
In the official repos there is only a free version called Code with which the synchronization failed, and I could not synchronize my settings and plugins. I tried with the Flatpak version and although the synchronization was working, the interface was inconsistent and using zsh from my distribution and not bash in the integrated terminal was complex. Then I gave up when I saw that I could not get a Git-flow plugin to work because although I had it installed, VSC did not see it.
Install the Snap version, the interface is consistent and 0 problems.
So I think it’s not a bad thing to gradually move towards more contained apps like snap or flatpak, but there is still a lot of work to be done to make them fit all needs.
Have you checked the github page? It lists solutions for (some of?) your issues: https://github.com/flathub/com.visualstudio.code#usage
But I agree with you, flatpak needs a lot of work. In saying that though, I’d never touch Snap - that just brings in a whole host of other issues. I’d rather just use the official tarball or install the official .deb/.rpm into a container.
Yes, I looked for the zsh problem and found the solution, I also looked for the git-flow problem. But this one seemed more complex to solve with the solutions I found, and I had no more time. So I opted for the quick option which was to install the snap version and everything flowed smoothly until today.
Linux is Linux - Nah… there will be distros like Arch where you can just use the AUR (someone started a project to bring AUR like functionality to other distros), and there will be distros that go mostly or all in on other packaging methods. There’s also wrappers like topgrade for those of us that don’t want to bother with multiple commands to update all.
