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
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 …
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.
oh wow that’s way worse than the crappy one he said in his actual post… He said a totally different software. He’s trying to run several things on this machine lol
Compile it yourself?
Compile it yourself.
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Use the flatpak and see if you like it, then compile it yourself.
…or just use the flatpak
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.There’s also deduplication across the different files. So you could even end up with less overall size over time if you use Flatpaks for everything.
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?
It is also nice to have independent packages. Consistent user experience means a lot.
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’s useful, but it isn’t the best option for everyone, so other options should be available.
Why would you want the app devs to make that? The whole problem with distro-specific packages is having to package for multiple formats and it’s a painstaking process that really isn’t worth any amount of time investment at all. If you’re an app developer, you’d much rather just make a universal package and hope that some distro package maintainer packages your app for their distro. That’s just basic common sense…
Because Flatpaks can’t share libraries or anything. It creates a lot of bloat that doesn’t need to be there. It’s great for users that want to make sure the app will always work, but it isn’t great for being efficient.
This is just a straight up lie. Flatpaks do share libraries, both as runtimes (as seen even in the screenshot here) and through deduplication between different runtimes and runtime versions. There’s usually very little bloat, if any, especially if you use Flatpaks a lot, which you probably should, given the huge number of advantages especially with proprietary apps.
and through deduplication between different runtimes and runtime versions. There’s usually very little bloat, if any, especially if you use Flatpaks a lot,
~20 different GUI applications, flatpak ended up using 14 GiB of storage while the appimage equivalent used 3.2 GIB.
And note I was not able to find flatpaks for ghostty, goverlay, kdeconnect and a few other apps, meaning the actual bloat of flatpak is even higher.
Edit: And this is even worse if you are an nvidia user, flatpak will download the entire nvidia driver as well.
AppImage isn’t a good comparison for a lot of different reasons and I think enough people have summarised that on the internet by now.
AppImage isn’t a good comparison for a lot of different reasons
Alright what does flatpak offer in this case?
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Has performance issues 1
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Has security issues even 1 2 3 and not to mention the whole bunch of flatpaks that use EOL runtimes which are even worse, not only for security, but also because that single flatpak ends up pulling an entire runtime for itself which makes even more bloated.
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And is insanely bloated as you saw already.
I think enough people have summarised that on the internet by now.
Such as? but I likely know already what is going to be said, hopefully is none of the following:
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“Depends on libfuse2” (not true since 2022 with the static appimage runtime, this also allows making appimages that work on musl systems, which several like ghostty, goverlay, Steam, gimp, cromite, citron already do)
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“You need to build on an old distro and it is hard”, once again not true anymore since you can now bundle the glibc as well (and it is needed for appimages to work on musl systems).
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“No wayland”, this is only true if you use linuxdeploy-qt to make the AppImage, the project has been abandoned already for several years and the only project I know that still uses it is qbittorrent-enhanced.
EDIT: And also hopefully you are aware that a lot of flatpaks are literary an AppImage shipped in a flatpak runtime, like:
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https://github.com/flathub/dev.vencord.Vesktop/blob/master/dev.vencord.Vesktop.yml#L34-L46
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https://github.com/flathub/com.ultimaker.cura/blob/master/com.ultimaker.cura.yml#L24-L44
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https://github.com/flathub/xyz.armcord.ArmCord/blob/master/xyz.armcord.ArmCord.yml#L40-L43
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https://github.com/flathub/chat.simplex.simplex/blob/master/chat.simplex.simplex.yml#L22-L31
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https://github.com/flathub/menu.kando.Kando/blob/master/menu.kando.Kando.yml#L33-L40
So yeah AppImage isn’t ideal, lets ship it in a container anyway 😁
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I habe a PC with an 8gb SSD
Are you using a first gen eeePC?
I think I bought one of those for 40€, 12 years ago.Man I miss the netbooks! Loved my Mini 9
In an alternate universe, phones with a fold-out hardware keyboard and full Linux OS are common.
And you can just plug them into a docking station to get a full PC.That alternate universe is this one in 2009… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900
I put OSX on mine. A $200 Macbook mini was a cool project and a neat conversation piece.
Are you me? I hackintoshed mine too for a while! Was still alternating between OSX and Linux at the time.
I wish I had moved to Linux sooner. I was in IT at the time and only saw windows and OSX in the wild. Servers were all windows except for one xserve. I still to this day have no idea what that server did for that customer. My only real experience with Linux at that time was FreePBX when setting up phone systems for offices.
Its a Fujitsu futro s920, got it off ebay
its barely legible but isnt that still less than a gb? where you you even get an 8gb ssd? why would you use one outside of some specialized embedded application that shouldn’t even have a desktop interface? and even then why not something lighter than kde or gnome
where you you even get an 8gb ssd
I bought a Fujitsu thin client for 30€, and I decided to spend the 5€ extra to get one with a drive (making it 30€ total.
why would you use one outside of some specialized embedded application that shouldn’t even have a desktop interface?
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I have way too much free time
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I have no money
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Originally it should only have been a minimal void Linux install so it can connect to my local server via RDP. But I just realised that that futro s920 with 4 1,5ghz cores is actually way faster and more reliable than my 4th gen Intel i5 will ever be
and even then why not something lighter than kde or gnome
I ssh’d into the PC. It runs xfce4, and it is just made to display shortwave (an Internet radio player) in full screen on a cashier terminal screen that I ripped from the terminal assembly. I just needed the cheapest thing to run shortwave on so my father has an Internet radio, since the other 2 options were
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buy a big ass Antenna for his normal radio, or
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buy a used Internet radio for 200€ (this way it only cost about 90€), wait until its Server is shut down, and then somehow with a mix of wireshark, dns logging, and pure luck somehow locally rerout the domain that the radio tries to connects to, figure out what kind of json file I need to host on my local server in order to make it refresh it’s database of Radios, and maintain these IPs forever.
also, please note, the image is in no way connected to this project, it just reminded me of it
Maybe get the cheapest micro sd card or usb drive you can find and install it on there? You could probably double your storage size for a couple of euros!
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Yes absolutely true, but also no.
https://gitlab.com/TheEvilSkeleton/flatpak-dedup-checker
For me it is 32GB of data with deduplication, and only like 25GB with BTRFS compression.
So while still way too much, not really a problem if you have a reasonable 50mbits+ internet connection and a 200GB+ SSD
There should still be waay more force. There should only be one runtime (FDO) and KDE and GNOME being extensions to that. Not sure if these perfectly dedupe though
Hope you don’t find out about Snaps
Wait till he finds out about Claps
Oh man I still remember the day I learned of the existence of Knaps and their shared libraries (Wrapz).
Don’t get me started on Schnapps
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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”.
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.
I hate people who only release on flatpak
You could just read what OP said
You could improve your reading comprehension.
Take your own advice
Then just unpack said flatpak, there are tools for that.
If it’s only available as a flatpak I don’t need it. 🤷
Its your call
However, Flatpak is growing in popularity so chances are that’s going to be more and more the norm. Same thing with Wayland.
People bitching about Flatpaks don’t understand that they have dedupe built in. You’re literally not using any more space and it’s easier for app developers to deploy.
Try using Snaps sometime, if you want something to actually bitch about.
2TB?
I only see around 500mb
Lots of people seem to like it. I also use it for like 2 or 3 desktop apps, but it’s alao littering my filesystem with gigabytes of runtimes. And I believe I can salely remove Skype now…
Who likes having their hard drive space wasted?
I like flatpaks when they come from the developer. They are often more stable, up-to-date and complete than those from OS repositories.
What I don’t like about them is when I have to fight the permissions. They’re often too tight and make integration with the rest of the OS too hard.
Here’s a rarely known secret of the Linux world. Almost no software in a Linux system came from the developer.
Every single distro, package manager or repository is handled by people who did not develop the software being packaged. The few exceptions are the software who distributes their own .deb/.rpm, appimage, flatpak or their own repository. But the bulk of tools, utilities and apps were handled by the people managing the distribution or the distro main repository. No sane developer has the team or the time to config, compile, package, and test their software to every single Linux distro that exists. Hence why Dev distributed versions are usually targeted to single channels and to specific distros and versions. Packages compatibility is a literal hell.
Shoulda just used nix B)
Nix is very interesting, but a completely new rope to shoot yourself in the foot. A new hell is still new though.
that’s why you just compile your .flatpak file and say “gl suckas, works 4 me :^)”
Technically it’s empty space that’s being wasted, if you fill it up it’s being useful!
No one does, but people like it when you install an application and it just works. It makes it easier to install applications regardless of which distro you’re on as well.
The benefits easily outweighs the cost of some extra space use. We’re not talking about a lot here, after all, with dedupping, shared runtimes and what have you.
Idk, probably all the people who downvoted OP and the majority of people here on Lemmy I met in discussions about Flatpak & Co. And If I look at the average size of a modern Windows installation, I’d say at least 70% of desktop users to begin with.
People who like having fine-grained security controls over their apps?
And the only possible way to have that is to burn through disk space?
Gigabytes?
I have a bunch of apps installed and it is only a little over a gigabyte.
Interesting. I have 4 tools installed as Flatpaks and that makes 4.4 GB
What tools?
Rnote, Skype, Teams and Televido (Live TV stream). Since they’re not in the repo or I needed sandboxing. I mean I don’t need any help or anything. That laptop has enough storage and a beginner distro on it.
