this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
694 points (92.5% liked)

Linux

56269 readers
831 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 30 points 4 days ago (37 children)

Certainly a fan, and I don't understand the hate towards it.

Flatpaks are my preferred way of installing Linux apps, unless it is a system package, or something that genuinely requires extensive permissions like a VPN client, or something many other apps depend on like Wine.

The commonly cited issues with Flatpaks are:

  • Performance. Honestly, do you even care if your Pomodoro timer app takes up 1 more megabyte of RAM? Do you actually notice?
  • Bloat. Oh, yes, an app now takes 20 MB instead of 10 MB. Again, does anybody care?
  • Slower and larger updates. Could be an issue for someone on a metered traffic, or with very little time to do updates. Flatpaks update in the background, though, and you typically won't notice the difference unless you need something newest now (in which case you'll have to wait an extra minute)
  • Having to check permissions. This is a feature, not a bug. For common proponents of privacy and security, Linuxheads grew insanely comfortable granting literally every maintainer full access to their system. Flatpaks intentionally limit apps functionality to what is allowed, and if in some case defaults aren't good for your use case - just toggle a switch in Flatseal, c'mon, you don't need any expertise to change it.

What you gain for it? Everything.

  • Full control over app's permissions. Your mail client doesn't need full system permissions, and neither do your messengers. Hell, even your backup client only needs to access what it backs up.
  • All dependencies built in. You'll never have to face dependency hell, ever, no matter what. And you can be absolutely sure the app is fully featured and you won't have to look for missing nonessential dependencies.
  • Fully distro-agnostic. If something works on my EndeavourOS, it will work on my OpenSUSE Slowroll, and on my Debian 12. And it will be exactly the same thing, same version, same features. It's beautiful.
  • Stability. Flatpaks are sandboxed, so they don't affect your system and cannot harm it in any way. This is why immutable distros feature Flatpaks as the main application source. Using them with mutable distributions will also greatly enhance stability.

Alternatives?

AppImages don't need an installation, so they are nice to see what the program is about. But for other uses, they are garbage-tier. Somehow they manage both not to integrate with the system and not be sandboxed, you need manual intervention or additional tools to at least update them/add to application menu, and ultimately, they depend on one file somewhere. This is extremely unreliable and one should likely never use AppImages for anything but "use and delete".

Snaps...aside from all the controversy about Snap Store being proprietary and Ubuntu shoving snaps down people's throats, they were just never originally developed with desktop applications in mind. As a result, Snaps are commonly so much slower and bulkier that it actually starts getting very noticeable. Permissions are also way less detailed, meaning you can't set apps up with minimum permissions for your use case.

This all leaves us with one King:

And it is Flatpak.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (15 children)

I've been working on Linux for 15 years now and I perfectly remember the origin of many concepts. If you look at it through time, what would it be like:

  1. We can build applications with external dependencies or a single binary, what should we choose?
  2. The community is abandoning a single binary due to the increased weight of applications and memory consumption and libraries problems
  3. Dependency hell is coming ...
  4. Snap, flatpack, appimage and other strange solutions are inventing something, which are essentially a single binary, but with an overlay (if the developer has hands from the right place, which is often not the case)
  5. Someone on lemmy says that he literally doesn't care if the application is built in a single binary, consumes extra memory and have libraries problems. Just close all permissions for that application...

Well, all I can say about this is just assemble a single binary for all applications, stop doing nonsense with a flatpack/snap/etc.

UPD: or if you really want to break all the conventions, just use nixos. You don't need snap/flatpack/etc.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago (6 children)

Flatpak is not single binary, Flatpaks have shared runtime (For example Freedesktop, GNOME, KDE runtimes)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Provided that flatpack has a common parent container, which is not always the case. More precisely, it almost never does. Because someone updates flatpack to new versions of the parent containers, and someone else does not.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

More precisely, it almost never does.

I don't know any flatpak in my system that don't use runtime (I have around 50 flatpak apps installed), or am I misunderstanding your point

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

runtime have versions too. If one runtime version use only one flatpack than exactly same as just static linking binary. Flatpack have just docker layeredfs and firejail in base.

id: org.gnome.Dictionary runtime: org.gnome.Platform runtime-version: '45' <- here sdk: org.gnome.Sdk command: gnome-dictionary

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

for some reason, i have both gnome platform 46 and gnome platform 47 installed in my system. that's probably it

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I see problem in that only in unmaintained apps (like org.gnome.Dictionary), I have only GNOME 47 & 48 for example and both of them still updating

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

In the initial stage of shared library support, everything was exactly the same. Let's look at it in 5 years... When some soft will archived and die, some stop maintaining, some new crated and brakes old dependencies...

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (12 replies)
load more comments (33 replies)