I’ve been using arch for a while now and I always used Flatpaks for proprietary software that might do some creepy shit because Flatpaks are supposed to be sandboxed (e.g. Steam). And Flatpaks always worked flawlessly OOTB for me. AUR for things I trust. I’ve read on the internet how people prefer AUR over Flatpaks. Why? And how do y’all cope with waiting for all the AUR installed packages to rebuild after every update? Alacritty takes ages to build for me. Which is why I only update the AUR installed and built applications every 2 weeks.
I prefer Flatpaks, not only because I support the format, but also because of containerization and the ability to clean up an application completely.
I absolutely hate it when apps randomly place config files everywhere.
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An AUR package has been done for Arch by (supposedly) someone who knows what they are doing and needs it on their Arch Machine
A Flatpak is something done by someone, to (supposedly) work everywhere, untested on Arch, that may or may not work. And crash (Ardour on Asahi). Or waste hours or you life to render files incorrectly (kdenlive on arch and asahi).
Native versions work perfectly.
I thought I was clever in using arch/aur for everything, but pull KDE or QT apps from Flatpak to keep my gnome install a bit more tidy… For this, you’d have to have those Flataks to work, and sometimes they don’t.
To be fair, there are a lot of Flatpacks published by the devs themselves (especially in the Gnome/GTK ecosystem).
I usually do distro repos, followed by aur, then flatpak if the aur version is too cumbersome (e.g. obs, game emulators). Funnily enough I use steam native because when I was using the flatpak. I had trouble with mods and things of that nature. A lot of that stuff either needs to be moved to different locations, straight up doesn’t work, or requires a bit of permission fiddling and I just didn’t wanna go through that. On the other hand. I believe there was a glibc issue on Arch that broke all games on steam native for a couple of days which the flatpak didn’t suffer from. Just goes to show nothing is perfect either way.
The AUR is the best thing about Arch. yay -Syu and everything is updated. Painless.
I tend to use binary packages to avoid long compiles. If an update includes something that is going to take a while, I often exclude that package from the update. After everything else is updated, I can run it again to get the last package or two. They can just run in the background while I do other stuff. If it is a program I am going to use right away, I may put off the update of that package until I am done my session. This is pretty common with JetBrains updates for example.
I do not have a single Flatpak.
Personally I tend to go AUR first, then Flatpak and then Appimage if there’s no other choice. Snaps never lol
The reason being, I find that Flatpaks sometimes have issues with not being able to access certain things in the filesystem which can cause problems. That’s presumably by design since they’re sandboxed and you can fix it with Flatseal or whatever, but it’s an extra level of fiddling that I can’t always be bothered with. I do prefer Flatpaks for certain things that are messy with dependencies though (looking at you, Steam.) Appimages I don’t really like because I hate having to go and check manually for updates for each one, it feels too much like Windows to me. But there are a couple of things that only have Appimage versions so I’ll suck it up.
Snaps I just find to be a huge pain in the ass, and I’ve never found an app I need that doesn’t already have a version on the AUR or as Flatpak or an Appimage, so I really have no need for them.
Appimages I don’t really like because I hate having to go and check manually for updates for each one, it feels too much like Windows to me. But there are a couple of things that only have Appimage versions so I’ll suck it up.
Oh that’s handy, thanks! I only have like 3 things as appimages but I already switched them over lol
I am using both of them without any problem.
The main advantage of Flatpaks (and things like AppImage) is that you have a single “executable” with everything you need and sometime that is useful even if the software is Opensource but the building dependencies are a nightmare. Subsurface (a dive log software) is an example.
If the AUR package is a simple build (or a binary which is a converted package) then go for it. If you need to start building a lot of additional package from AUR to meet the dependencie then I would suggest, in order, to look for the Flatpak (or AppImage) package or to install an helper to build the packages
both is good
AppImage !
- Open format? Yes
- Free format? Yes
- Fully Contained Single Executable Support . Like an exe file for Windows systems Yes (the only one)
- App Size** The lowest** !
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppImage
Matrix
https://www.fosslinux.com/42410/snap-vs-flatpak-vs-appimage-know-the-differences-which-is-better.htm
https://phoenixnap.com/kb/flatpak-vs-snap-vs-appimage \Why would the app size be the lowest? I could maybe see that for one single AppImage (though I don’t expect a significant difference), but as soon as you have two or more apps, sharing dependencies would make Flatpaks smaller than AppImages.
Aren’t AppImages still limited to Xorg?
Also there’s no centralised update mechanism or dependency deduplication, no?
