Stolen from linuxmemes at deltachat

  • m_r_butts@kbin.social
    918·
    11 months ago

    I think this is funny, but it’s hard for me to hate too much on flatpaks. Disk space is practically free now, and having spent a good chunk of my career fighting DLL hell, I have a lot of sympathy for the problem it’s trying to solve.

    • neclimdul@lemmy.world
      87·
      11 months ago

      Yeah I mean it’s taking 500G of my terrabyte ssd. What else was I going to use that for? Installing games off steam? Two node modules folders?

    • Pantherina@feddit.deOP
      202·
      11 months ago

      Its good and bad. Bad because the base system cant use it and its not the main packaging choice.

      Lots of good apps like OBS use outdated runtimes, which simply should not be used anymore. I am not sure if this is a security issue but probably it is, and it creates this unnecessary Runtime bloat.

    • bouh@lemmy.world
      163·
      11 months ago

      I hate this philosophy so much! I hate developers for it! It’s like they gave up on even trying to do anything about retrocompatibility and managing libraries and dependancies.

      Anyway it will collapse soon. I just wish it was sooner.

      • catastrophicblues@lemmy.ca
        5·
        11 months ago

        Honestly I get both sides of it. Your view makes sense as an end-user and from a philosophical perspective. But some people have legacy software that needs conflicting dependency versions, for instance. It’s just a trade-off.

      • Synthead@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        11 months ago

        Yeah, package maintainers should have their dependencies figured out. “Managing dependencies is too hard” is a distro packager’s problem to figure out, and isn’t a user problem. When they solve it and give you a package, you don’t need to figure it out anymore.

        Plus, frequent breaking changes in library APIs is a big no-no, so this is avoided whenever possible by responsible authors. Additionally, authors relying on libs with shitty practices is also a no-no. But again, you don’t need to worry about dependences because your packager figured this out, included the correct files with working links, and gave them to you as a solved problem.

    • AlexJD@feddit.uk
      163·
      11 months ago

      Honestly this. It’s so nice to not have to hunt for a specific library that depends on 20 other libraries. I’d rather pay in disk space than deal with that.

    • uis@lemmy.world
      53·
      11 months ago

      it’s trying to solve.

      It does not solve it. It just slaps more DLLs on top. Package managers do.

            • uis@lemmy.world
              2·
              11 months ago

              This is conflicting files, it indeed means that different packages try to install same files(usually happens when same package have multiple names).

              But this is different error from what you mentioned before. So I’m asking what dependencies conflict in your case? Libboost?

              You either don’t understand what’s being discussed here, or you’re trolling. Google it yourself if you want to know more.

              I ask what dependencies cause conflict. And why did you provide link to another error? Your comment has conflicting dependencies too.

    • Seven@startrek.website
      2·
      11 months ago

      Some people have limited bandwidth for downloads, and a simple program can run to more space than a basic distro.

  • BeigeAgenda@lemmy.ca
    221·
    11 months ago

    Pro tip: Use /var/lib/flatpak instead of /dev/null for a neater result, you avoid having to clean up spilled bits.

  • SavvyWolf@pawb.socialEnglish
    3111·
    11 months ago

    Recently switched to using Flatpaks instead of random .debs for a number of apps on my system. /var/lib/flatpak takes up 7GiB, which honestly isn’t that much (even though it’s like quarter of the OS size), given that’s the software I use most of the time.

    Was skeptical at first about Flatpaks, but SteamOS showed me that is great at just giving OS developers access to a fully populated app store with minimal work.

    Honestly, nowadays I’d say “ability to install flatpaks” should be the criteria on which we decide whether an OS is really “linux” or not (that is, SteamOS is, but Android isn’t).

    Edit: Okay. I said something stupid here, my bad. What I was trying to get at is the distinction between Android, etc. and “Desktop” Linuxes like traditional distros, Chromebooks and the Steam Deck. Even though it technically runs Linux, it’s hard to argue that developers for Android are really writing apps that work on “Linux”. Wheras if someone releases a Flatpak version of their app because they think the Steam deck is cool, it works on other distros “for free”.

    • starman@programming.devEnglish
      251·
      11 months ago

      Honestly, nowadays I’d say “ability to install flatpaks” should be the criteria on which we decide whether an OS is really “linux” or not

      I think you should check out what Linux means

    • Pantherina@feddit.deOP
      10·
      11 months ago

      Yup, Flatpaks are indeed great. Isolation, modern versions, no weird dependencies.

      I have to manage a Debian PC fleet and I am too stupid for Ansible, so they all just got cleaned up extremely, all that bloat gone, apps replaced with flatpaks and now the system has like ⅓ the packages. Automatic updates then, VirtualBox is the only stupid thing with their kmod and all, but Virtmanager is also already on there.

      Not all apps can be flatpaks, for example virt-manager, gnome-boxes can but its really restricted then.

      But keeping the system slim just makes so much sense, its like removing this distro randomness which I am sure is needed for Linux to get their shit together and stop doing the same work at 10 different places.

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
      31·
      11 months ago

      There are some (few) apps where flatpak may be the right solution. Many apps should NOT be flatpak

  • Synthead@lemmy.worldEnglish
    161·
    11 months ago

    Flatpak: “I would switch from Windows to Linux, but Linux is too bloated”

    • ichbinjasokreativ@lemmy.world
      1·
      11 months ago

      Having compared snaps in ubuntu 23.10 to flatpaks on opensuse tumbleweed, I can safely say that snaps tend to be faster for me with less weirdness happening during usage. Some programs were the same (obsidian for example) other comparisons were done from the same category (Firefox snap vs chromium flatpak). I genuinely prefer snap and don’t see the issues people often quote. Also, that the backend isn’t open isn’t a big deal to me, as snaps themselves generally still are.

    • Pantherina@feddit.deOP
      3·
      11 months ago

      Uhm I do, daily since a year or so.

      Most apps are slim, but needing 8 runtimes or so is nothing rare at all.

        • Pantherina@feddit.deOP
          1·
          11 months ago

          Yes I have do the same, layer small packages, use Flatpaks and complex stuff like (R + rstudio + COPR + Modules) or (QGis + grass + python + plugins) or IDEs in a distrobox.

          At least in Distrobox you can also create rootful containers which could run an entire DE, or run libvirtd in there and use virt-manager in a rootless box, connected over ssh. Totally works but its a bit complicated. But for software with systemd or USB access this is needed.

          Flatpaks share libraries, but they are sometimes not packaged well, contrary to distro packages, which on the other hand may pull in loots of dependencies.

          Would be interesting to run all packages in a rootful distrobox and have Fedora RPMs on the other hand.

          There are some hardening problems though, that I dont really understand, with user namespaces being blocked in the hardened kernel. On Arch there is bubblewrap-suid which fixes that in a way I also dont understand yet, but Podman, Distrobox, Toolbox, Docker etc dont work yet, and may not work too.