target OS is debian or linux mint
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flatpaks are designed for gui apps, and due to packaging dependencies, they are extra heavy in disk space. flatpaks are also most often installed on the user, not systemwide, so no root permissions needed to install.
apt installs systemwide exclusively, but can have a much smaller download size if the dependencies are already installed. Apps sharing dependencies means much less disk space. cli is supported.
they are extra heavy in disk space
While they use more disk space than most native packages, this point is often exaggerated. Flatpak uses deduplication and shared runtimes if multiple apps use the same runtime.
While they use more disk space than most native packages, this point is often exaggerated. Flatpak uses deduplication and shared runtimes if multiple apps use the same runtime.
4.79 GiBwith deduplication.Worth mentioning that my entire distro with those applications included, and about 30 appimages is
4.2 GIBtotal, and that includes the home btw.Appimages don’t use any deduplication at all and usually package everything in the app.
Sometimes they don’t do that though and expect your system to have certain packages, but that can and does cause reliability and portability issues.
E: portability not probability lol
but that can and does cause reliability and probability issues.
Flatpak and snaps have been the most broken on this. Just recently I was talking about issues that I had with yuzu on that. And more recently steam as I wanted to test something…
Also I remember you, you were the guy that didn’t reply when you gave a number that I found very odd (Basically impossible lol):
https://lemmy.ml/post/16669819/11551689
Were you guy that downvoted the comment btw?
Appimages don’t use any deduplication at all and usually package everything in the app.
Yes, doesn’t mean anything if flatpak uses way more storage…
I don’t reply to most comments. You should see my inbox, I have hundreds of undealt with notifications. I only even spotted this reply because I was correcting an autocorrect mistake on my previous one.
My numbers were correct and I explained why.
And your experience is pretty far from mine, I had to give up on appimages because they are problematic by design.
And like I said, Flatpak hasn’t been bad on storage for me. It uses deduplication and unlike you I didn’t go out of my way to cherrypick a small handful of applications that just so happened to use three different runtimes in order to bash it.
Use appimages if that’s what you want, but they’re not really an answer to Flatpaks, due to the huge systematic problems they have.
My numbers were correct and I explained why.
Do you mind telling me the application list so I can check that myself?
because they are problematic by design. I didn’t go out of my way to cherrypick a small handful of applications that just so happened to use three different runtimes
Kinda odd, I didn’t even know it was using 3 different runtimes until very recently, I just installed the biggest applications that I had as appimages to make the comparison, and yuzu because I use that one very often lol.
EDIT: Don’t you think that on itself isn’t problematic by design?
in order to bash it.
How should I have phrased my comment so that I wasn’t bashing flatpak?
due to the huge systematic problems they have.
Such as?
Lots, LOTS, TL;DR - flatpaks are sandboxed and work on every* distro out there, while apt packages are not and only work on debian and it’s derivatives. I’d say on mint or debian, prefer using flatpaks over apt packages as you’re usually gonna get newer versions of software.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet is interopability, that is, flatpak interacting with the rest of your system.
I’m not that familair with flatpak, but in my brief experience with the steam flatpak, I had trouble getting it to recognize my controllers. Steam installed through pacman (Arch’s package manager) had no such issues, on the other hand. My hunch is that this has to with flatpaks being more isolated from the rest of your system.
Im pretty sure that’s just some kind of permission issue, but it can be nice to not have to troubleshoot acces rights and the like. But this is obviously a double edged sword: more isolation may also mean more security, just at the cost of ease of interaction with other components.
The steam flatpak can’t install udev rules. It works if you install a packacke such as
steam-deviceson your host system. See https://github.com/flathub/com.valvesoftware.Steam/wiki#my-controller-isnt-being-detected
In addition to other people’s comments, flatpaks are usually more up to date than their apt counterpart (expecially those from the debian stable repositories).
I run debian and I deliberately installed some software from flatpak (eg. Ardour and Guitarix) because the deb package is a whole version behind.Flatpaks won’t get their libs updated all at once by just updating a library. This can be very bad in cases like bugs in openssl. Instead of just updating one library and all other software benefiting from the fix, with flatpaks, you need to deal with updating everything manually and waiting for the vendor to actually create an update package.
I’m not 100% sure about this. Flatpak has some mechanisms that would allow to manage dependencies in a common fashion.
Common libraries like OpenSSL are usually bundled in runtimes. So if my application uses e.g.
org.gnome.Platform, I don’t have to update my application if there is a fix in a library of that runtime, I just need to update the runtime.The runtime is also shared by all applications that use this runtime.
What’s up with all the negativity around flatpaks? I use Arch (btw) and I try to install as much as I can using flatpak. I think they are great. They are compatible, usually up to date, easy to install, easy to remove and it won’t break your system. The sandbox can be edited to include more paths etc.
If I developed a Linux app I would absolutely package it as a flatpak. If a package is in pacman, however, I see no reason to use the flatpak version instead.
Flatpak’s benefits mostly exist for the developer. Apt is more tightly integrated with the distro, which is generally advantageous, but also means more work for packaging. Flatpak’s benefit is that it’s a compatibility layer for lots of different distros. In a perfect world, every distro would have a large library of packages in the official repo, but that’s a lot of work for devs, and flatpak lets them avoid that sprawling support.
I’m using MX, debian based, apt package, I have 0 flatpak/snap. They are up to date on about everything, like the latest Firefox I got this morning in a simple .deb that nala (apt frontend) installed without problems.
I never ever installed a snap/flat in my Linux years.
I thought id give flatpak firefox a shot and the profiles are broken. I might be able to fix it by making some symlinks but it left a bad taste in my mouth. I was unable to get it to recognize my userChrome.css
