Cursed solution to a cursed problem 🤷
Linux
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
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
I spent my time fighting AppImages until Canonical started to force Snap on me. I hated Snap so bad it forced me to switch distros. Now I appreciate Flatpak as a result and I don't find Flatpaks all that bad, either. Also, I haven't found myself in dependency-hell nor have I crashed my distro from unofficial Repos in well over a decade.
-It's a long way of saying It works for me and it's not Snap.
It just doesnt work half the time. I avoid them as much as possible.
Flatpaks are great for situations where installing software is unnecessary complex or complicated.
I have Steam installed for some games, and since this is a 32 bits application it would install a metric shit-don of 32 bit dependencies I do not use for anything else except Steam, so I use the Flatpak version.
Or Kdenlive for video editing. Kdenlive is the only KDE software I use but when installing it, it feels like due to dependencies I also get pretty much all of the KDE desktop’s applications I do not need nor use nor want on my machine. So Flatpak it is.
And then there is software like OBS, which is known for being borderline unusable when not using the only officially supported way to use it on Linux outside of Ubuntu – which is Flatpak.
works perfectly with my Arch Linux
btw
Honestly, i'm not entirely sure what Flatpaks are all about. Not sure I could explain them. But I use them. I've used apt. I've even used Pacman and Yay in Manjaro for a few years. Now, I also Flatpak (no longer on Manjaro, though. I no longer boot to a blank screen every 6 months or so! Very nice!)
Flatpaks are basically containers, allowing applications to maintain their own dependencies separate from your system. It's similar to a Windows program shipping with its own precompiled DLLs, helping prevent dependenct conflicts when you go to update something you installed with pacman or yay.
never tried flatpak, snaps were so bad as to never consider non-native installs or just use docker instances when I need to run something weird. so dunno.
whats the use case for a flatpak exactly? maybe im not the target audience???
Flatpaks mean you don't have to compile everything from scratch and solve dependency conflicts if you want a newer version of a program than what's available in your distro's repo, of if it's something that doesn't have a native version at all.
Flatpaks suck
Ubuntu has turned to dogshit
Ubuntu is using Snaps though...
i agree ubuntu is corpo drivel now but flatpaks are actually quite useful for some applications.
the sandboxing is nice to not have to setup manually for every little thing, and i say that as someone who avoids flatpaks generally.
sometimes you just wanna get things up and running, not everything needs to be a unix circlejerk.
I have used rpms, AppImages, Flatpaks, and source. I have even used a snap or two when I had no other choice.
If you can't work with them all, can you even say you Linux Bro?
Bro, TRUTH. I have preferences but when you gotta get something done, it doesn't matter how the app comes bundled. I'd run .exe's through Wine if I needed to.
Speaking of terminal emulators! - https://arcan-fe.com/2025/01/27/sunsetting-cursed-terminal-emulation/
iit: nerds unable to comprehend that building a piece of software from source in not something every person can do.
EDIT: or doesn’t want to do
Learn
one of my least favorite things about arch and other rolling distros is that yay/pacman will try and recompile shit like electron/chromium from source every few days unless you give it very specific instructions not to - which is annoying as shit bc compiling the entirety of chrome from source takes hours even with decent hardware.
granted, i fucking hate google products too but if you’re doing any web dev it’s necessary sometimes.
idk im definitely willing to admit i might be the idiot here. managing your packages with pacman might just be routine to some people. to me arch is the epitome of classic bad UX in an open source project. it’s like they got too focused on being cmatrix-style terminal nerds and forgot to make their software efficiently useable outside of 5 very specific people’s workflows. it’s not even the terminal usage that is bad about arch. plenty of things are focused on that and… don’t do it shittily? idk…
edit: yes to all the arch fanboy’s points in response to me. i used to be super into arch and am aware of the fact that this isn’t explicit behavior but to act like it doesn’t happen in a typical arch user experience is disingenuous. i also disagree with the take that arch doesn’t endorse this outright with its design philosophy, bc it does. the comparison of the AUR to other, similar things like PPAs doesn’t land for me bc PPAs aren’t integrated into the ecosystem nearly as much as AUR is with arch. you can’t tell people to just grab the binaries or not use AUR whenever it’s convenient to blame the user, when arch explicitly endorses a philosophy amicable to self-compilation and also heavily uses the AUR even in their own arch-wiki tutorials for fairly basic use cases. arch wants to have its cake and eat it too and be a great DIY build it yourself toolkit while also catering to daily driver use and more generalist users. don’t get me wrong, it’s the best attempt at such a thing i’ve seen - but at a certain point you have to ask if the premise makes sense anymore. in the case of arch, it doesn’t and it causes several facets of the ecosystem to flounder from a user perspective. the arch community’s habit of shouting “skill issue” at people when they point out legitimate issues with the design philosophy bugs the fuck out of me. this whole OS is a camel.
Is there no -bin version available for those packages?
sometimes you’re working with particular releases or builds that don’t, but like i said i might be the idiot lol.
i like the concept of arch. i don’t like the way i need to come up with a new solution for how im managing my packages virtually every few days that often requires novel information. shit, half the time you boot up an arch system if you have sufficient # of packages there is 9/10 times a conflict when trying to just update things naively. like i said it’s cool on paper and im sure once you use it as a daily driver for awhile it just becomes routine but it’s more the principle of the user experience and its design philosophy that i think might be poor.
arch is for techies in the middle of the bell curve imo… people on the left and the right, when it comes to something as simple as managing all my packages and versions, want something that just works^TM^ - unless i specifically want to fuck with the minutiae.
I've been on Garuda for 4 years or so, not once has this happenoed to me
is garuda like endeavorOS or manjaro where it’s technically still an arch-based rolling release distro but the OS maintainers hold packages from upstream mainline arch?
i don’t hate that model, it’s more fun to use as an end user for sure, but i feel like it kind of defeats the point of arch’s entire ethos lmao.
I get that with NixOS even if I use a tablet as my release. It's pretty annoying if it is too new and not cached yet.
I am definitely a fan. A lot of people say that flatpaks are bad because of sandboxing but I haven't seemed to have any issues with it.
Although I do try to use dnf when a dnf package is available (I use fedora)
About the image: The joke's on you, I install my flatpaks via the terminal.
I've started using flatpaks more after starting using Bazzite and I liked them more than I expected. As a dev, I still need my work tools to be native, but most of my other needs are well covered by flatpaks.
Tip: Flatseal is a great config manager for flatpaks' permissions.
Installing flatpaks via the terminal is so much faster for some reason, so I always do it that way.
I installed flatseal but I never understand what is essential and what is not.
It is mostly trial and error. I use it mostly to set envvars.
As an example, I add the ~/.themes folder and the GTK_THEME to allow some apps to get the themes I downloaded.
Oh, so flatpaks cannot automatically get system themes?
If it is trial and error, is it really useful for a normal user?