this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
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How does it stack up against traditional package management and others like AUR and Nix?

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[–] 4vr@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago

I didn’t want to containerize every installed app. Switched to Arch and don’t have to worry about it.

[–] JoeKrogan@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I like it but I would prefer it to be more restrictive out of the box. Such as have apps declare a list of urls the are permitted to contact , a browser could have * .

I'd like a more granular filesystem list too more akin to apparmors were each file path needed is explicitly defined, in some cases you would need a wildcard or a directory but for most apps this could be done.

I like it, it's good for desktop apps but I LOVEEEEEE nix, if there was a graphical box distro I think it would beat everything else out of the water. Full reproducible builds is not something to sneeze at

[–] femboy_bird@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 year ago

I usually prefer not to use them, but they flatpak for Prism Launcher comes with all versions of Java preinstalled which is convenient because I play verious versions of Minecraf, other than that I try to use xbps as much as possible

[–] XenBad@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

They’re great on certain desktops, like Fedora’s Atomic Desktops, but you usually have to work around Flatpak specific issues. On NixOS there doesn’t seem to be a declarative way to install them.

[–] teolan@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I love flatpaks and flathub. They're amazing for GUI apps, though there are still a couple of wrinkles that needs to be ironed out.

I would really love if it was better with regards to cli apps and developer tooling though. As someone that uses a lot of TUI apps that seriously limit how much I can use flatpak.

[–] Harbinger01173430@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago
[–] mfat@lemdro.id 1 points 1 year ago

I like them sonce they're easy to install and you can update all Flatpaks at once. But I don't likke the paths and run commands. Very unintuitive.

[–] iopq@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Flatpak works most of the time. Nix works almost all the time (except when stuff happens like the download fails)

Flatpak is free to assume anything about your system which is sometimes not compatible with NixOS

[–] synae@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Where's that Chris Pratt meme? --

I don't know what that is and at this point I'm afraid to ask

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[–] Dehydrated@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

It's pretty good for desktop apps, but it doesn't provide CLI applications, so I still have to rely on the AUR. There are some issues with it, but overall I think it's the best solution we currently have. And it's very easy to use, which is great for new users and it will become important if Linux continues growing like this.

[–] clemdemort@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (5 children)

It's the easiest solution to packaging software for Linux that doesn't mean it's good, In fact fhe way no dependencies are shared absolutely wrecks my hard drive and makes everything super long (downloading, updating, etc...).

Where it shines is security but to be honest do you really need an open source app to be in it's own secure sandbox?

I vastly prefer nix and I wish packaging stuff for it was easier.

[–] Jegahan@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

As other have pointed out, saying that "no dependencies are shared" is a very missinformed take, given that sharing dependencies as runtimes is an integral part of Flatpak's structure. But what makes it even funnier and more obvious that you don't know what your talking about, is that you than cite Nix as something you "vastly prefer" when Nix actually deals with dependencies in a very similar way to Flatpak. From the official site:

You can have multiple versions or variants of a package installed at the same time. This is especially important when different applications have dependencies on different versions of the same package — it prevents the “DLL hell”.

In both Flatpak and Nix, apps will only download a different version of a dependency when they need it. This ensure that, instead of breaking, the app will work the same on any system (be it an old stable Debian or a bleeding edge Arch system), without requiring devs to create monkey patches that they have to maintain as things evolve. It has the potential to immensely reduce the burden on app devs and maintainers, and make it a lot easier to make apps for Linux.

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