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Is Flatpaks the future for Linux? (lemmy.blahaj.zone)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Same for me, snaps work everytime, flatpacks rarely do.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Firefox would like a word….

Forced snap+Firefox is hell

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Flatpaks are slow and take more resources. It is only useful for the riches who can afford 16 GB+ RAM and TBs of storage.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.