Stolen from linuxmemes at deltachat
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.
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?
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.
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Lots of good apps like OBS use outdated runtimes, which simply should not be used anymore.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.
Cry-laughing in
/nix/store
“Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping”
*Terabytes
Still better than snap
~$ du -sh /var/lib/flatpak/ 6.3G /var/lib/flatpak/
oh my god
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”.
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.
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