For context: I habe a PC with an 8gb SSD and I somehow need to get an app on there that only has a flatpak release
8GB SSD
There’s your problem. The last time 8GB was plenty was in 1998.
Yup. Those 64 GB SSDs many retailers put into cheap laptops already come dangerously close to violating the Geneva Convention. 8GB is just stupid, even for a Linux system.
Even cheap SD cards are larger these days. The smallest SSD you can buy in the UK right now is 250GB.
Amazon sells 24 GB ones…
Oh really? Wow! Still 3x more than 8GB though :)
Are they booting of an SD card? Mabey is a Pi or WiFi router?
No need to hate on someone for their hardware.
Reading through the comments here, the Linux community slowly seems move away from “runs on about every piece of hardware you can think of” to “if you don’t have at least the Nimbus 2000 that’s on you, sucker!”
Flatpak seems to be the best choice for consistency and to have it working straight out of the box. I think Linux currently needs this because we’re getting a lot less tech-savvy Linux users nowadays. Don’t get me wrong; package managers should still be used, but how are we going to get people to change if they run into package conflicts or accidentally uninstall a wrong package?
And universal compatability. One repo, for all distros. That’s a big plus too!
Until it doesn’t work. There’s a lot of subtlety, and at some point you’ll have to match what the OS provide. Even containers are not “run absolutely anywhere” but “run mostly anywhere”.
That doesn’t change the point, of course; software that are dependent on the actual kernel/low level library to provide something will be hard to get working in unexpected situations anyway, but the “silver bullet” argument irks me.
Everything is flawed, there is no silver bullet. But again, it’s still a massive improvement over what we had previously.
That’s called having just one distro.
Great… Now, you just need to convince the big distros to do that… Easy!!!111
Well, that’s the neat part. We don’t need to do that because what Flatpak does, doesn’t matter for them. People can just install Flatpak in their system and they have access to everything. I realise for system components it’s a different story, but that’s not the use case, it’s for applications.
Edit: typo.
Thats… the point of flatpak.
It is also nice to have independent packages. Consistent user experience means a lot.
It’s useful, but it isn’t the best option for everyone, so other options should be available.
I just what to install an app. I don’t want to spend an evening figgering out how to get a PWA to install. I don’t want to consult a form or your git repository to install some package I will use once and will be patched out in the next version.
Flatpaks implement deduping, so they actually don’t take that much space when installed.
I habe a PC with an 8gb SSD
I think I found your real problem.
You hate people who spend hundreds of ours of their free time developing software, who then release that software for free, under no obligation to you or anyone else, and your reasoning is because they provide it in a packaging solution you don’t find ideal?
Maybe fuck off and write your own software.
No, they hate flatpak, one of the many option to distribute software, which is not the only one even if you consider the “must run on many distro” restriction (which isn’t 100% true, kinda like the Java write once run anywhere). There are other options, some more involved, some simpler, to do so.
They didn’t say they hate devs, that’s on you, grabbing a febble occasion to tell someone that voiced his opinion to “fuck off”.
I hate people who only release on flatpak
You could just read what OP said
You could improve your reading comprehension.
Then they should say they hate flatpak, or they are frustrated/disappointed when something they are interested in is only on flatpak.
Instead of doing that, they said they hate people who only use flatpak. Words matter, and that kind of entitlement needs to be shut down. The devs don’t owe them anything and they certainly don’t deserve hatred for their packaging solution. There are many constructive ways OP could resolve the issue. Open a feature request issue on the bug tracker, build it locally, send an email, offer to maintain another packaging method, etc.
Personally I do like the ideas behind Snap/Flatpak. I think the sandboxing is a huge deal and will improve security going forward.
In a world where space is usually the cheapest and most available hardware on a PC, I tend to agree. That being said, it’s the kind of solution that comes from engineers who put the onus on the hardware to make up for their shitty software. Engineers like me.
Yeah. Someone has to put in the work for packaging an application if you want it as a .deb/.rpm etc. package and deal with any bugs that might come up, and it’s not going to be me (speaking as a user, not a developer).
That said, I also painted myself into a corner when it comes to harddrive space. LUKS can be complicated, man …
In a world where space is usually the cheapest and most available hardware on a PC
I read this in the movie trailer guy’s voice
Yeah flatpak won’t work on my Nokia 3310 either, what a shit software…
Edit: if you upvoted this comment, your kneecaps pop when you pick up things from the ground
I’m too old to pick up stuff from the ground, I use one of them claws on a stick. Also, the 3210 was a nice phone while the 3310 was for the hip kids.
Pff, they’re already doing that for past few years =\
Why the hell do you only have 8GB? Are you trying to install flatpaks on a smart fridge?
Sort of, actually
I was trying to build a PC just to play internet radio on using Shortwave, and a 30€ thin client with 4 1,5Ghz cores and no active cooling, 4 gigs of ram and an 8gb ssd were more than enough for that
I didn’t even know ssd’s(nuts) that small existed
I just want you to know, I appreciated your deez nuts joke.
It was subtle. It was well-done. Roasted, even.
Maybe it’s an eMMC chip on an embedded device?
For your use case, building from source might be more practical.
Cut the crap. Flatpak uses hardlink from repo where file names are jash of the file itself. The chance of duplication is exactly same as that of duplicate files of same name in same directory.
Flatpak repo grows because we trade uncertainty over abi stability with installing all needed versions of libraries. For abi incompatible builds you could already do that in many distros (versioned soname) but to a lesser extent.
Also I usually do not install nvidia GL with flatpaks that I won’t run on nvidia on hybrid gpu laptops anyway for energy reasons.
Yeah, I’m not a fan of flatpak for my usage, but this isn’t a great argument against it.
I’d rather someone “only” release on flatpak if that’s the simplest way they can support Linux compared to no support at all.
Oh lmao, I decided to look into this. https://github.com/flathub/com.ktechpit.torrhunt/blob/master/com.ktechpit.torrhunt.yaml
Looks like it just downloads the .snap package (directly from Canonical’s website) and extracts it. It’s also, of course, completely closed source so who knows what it’s doing when it’s running.
It’s also, of course, completely closed source so who knows what it’s doing when it’s running.
Ah, yes. The Pinnacle of security
Compile it yourself?
Compile it yourself.
Instructions unclear. Cmake ninja tool chain uses another 8gb and still get compile errors
did you see those little
<in front of the download sizes?org.kde.KStyle.Adwaita,org.kdePlatform.Locale,org.kde.Platformandcom.ktechpit.torrhuntwon’t be fully downloaded as those are possibly already installed and can be reused, so in the best case you only downloadorg.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-570-86-16fully.Lol kinda wild to me seeing flatpak hate as a new Linux user (running fedora with kids). Flatpaks have just worked for me and it’s been fantastic
If you’re new to Linux, then your probably not familiar with the full Linux community yet. Much like in real life, online Linux spaces tend to have a very loud minority of conservatives who hate progress.
Usually you’ll see them hating on things like systemd, 64bit architectures, containers, new packaging systems (like Flatpak), immutable and experimental distros (like Nix), Wayland, “bloated” desktops like KDE or Gnome, and much more.
And just like in real life, the antidote is to not take another person’s word for it. Do your own homework/try things out yourself and arrive at your own conclusions.
Flatpaks work great on my laptop, but they have can have issues if you use multiple hard-drives or partitions. Especially for gaming.
I’m coming back to Linux after a hiatus. I’ve spent most of my time with the Debian flavors. Not afraid of the command line, but not an expert either.
I’m trying out Bluefin right now, semi-immutable atomic os based on silverblue, based on Fedora.
On normal installs, I usually change and install enough stuff, that when it comes time to upgrade to the next os version, I’m sometimes not able to without introducing instability or it outright falling. The former more common than the latter.
Let’s just say I got used to reinstalling and starting from scratch, especially if I experimented too hard and broke something big like my DE or drivers.
So with bluefin I’m hoping to leave everything that’s core, alone. I’m trying to rely on flatpaks, app images, and distrobox for everything else.
So far so successful. I’ve only got a couple minor gripes, some limitations of flatpaks. But I’ve also only been at it for like a week, so we’ll see.
I guess my point is, flatpaks have a place 🤷♂️
This is where I’m at too. If I go crazy and start installing stuff natively to experiment I end up with extra stuff auto configured that’s no longer needed and random problems I’m too lazy to figure out how to solve. Flatpak doesn’t do that and I don’t have to worry about that. I can install random stuff to play with and uninstall it cleanly. Some packages need more system access than flatpak gives natively and with those I’ll make the decision of if I want to set it up and tear it down manually or not.
Storage is cheap, my time not so much.
“maybe a software being excessively bloated isn’t a good thing”
“just buy more storage bro”
B*tch. i live in a third world country, with limited internet and data plan, and also is still a student. If i can just buy more storage and better hardware i will.
2TB?
I only see around 500mb
Anger has a way of adding a few zeros.
