Fun fact: there used to be an Authy flatpak that just installed the snap inside
Oh, what the fuck!?
TBH I wouldn’t mind it that much. The whole point of flatpak is that the developer can do whatever demented satanic rituals they want inside of the sandbox, and it won’t contaminate the rest of the system.
Yo dawg, I herd you like containers so I put snap in yo flatpak, so that u can sandbox in your sandbox
Flatpak has long had the ability to dump the contents of a snap into it, because snaps had already solved many of the build issues flatpaks were struggling with and they used similar runtimes for their sandboxing. It’s also a convenient way to convert apps over, since many apps got packaged as snaps before flatpak was really usable.
Just use Ente instead.
I think I’ve landed on Flatpak as my favourite between Snap, Flatpak, and AppImage. AppImage, when it works, is nice though. Snaps are just kind of inconvenient (auto-updates are a no for me) and bloated and the things Canonical are doing as an organization put a bad taste in my mouth.
I’ve had bad experiences with AppImages. For universal format they do a really poor job at that. And it’s a huge step back into Windows direction that you’ll have to manually download, update etc your shit. Makes managing a bunch of apps a pain.
The thing with appimages is that they expect the developer to have full knowledge of what libraries need to be bundled with their app, which makes it difficult to make truly universal appimages. In flatpak you just select one of a set list of runtimes and add any additional dependencies on top of it. Flatpak also re-uses the files for each runtime in between the different apps that use it, which saves a lot of disk space.
But isn’t appimage the closest one to the app-system from Android? Since things could be really different on many clients an “app-container” is the best solution.
Why not containerise everything? You need libreoffice? No problem, here is a docker or podman container.
BTW. I like flatpak, too. It’s the most stable, but I never understand it’s mechanics. There is always another pack installed, freecode, gtk, qt whatever. Even if the system has already the correct gtk version, nope, the dev decided to use the gtk image from Ubuntu.
I’m not too familiar with whatever Android is doing with apks these days tbh. I just don’t like how AppImages fails at the one thing it should do (universality) and doesn’t have the repo model built in. You can have third party solutions to that but it’s just not the same experience.
Why not containerise everything? You need libreoffice? No problem, here is a docker or podman container.
I’ve heard people suggest such a solution. Everything is a container and stuff is just exported out so that it shows up to the system like a normal program. Can’t really say I’m the right person to judge the pros and cons.
There is always another pack installed, freecode, gtk, qt whatever. Even if the system has already the correct gtk version, nope, the dev decided to use the gtk image from Ubuntu.
It can be both good and bad and sometimes it’s necessary. The whole system relies on being able to use different versions of libraries. But having them as separate packs can help in that programs can share those packs so as a dev you can just target one common base and have your stuff work everywhere. And sharing those runtimes has the benefit of someone else keeping it up to date while you can just test if the updated version works for you and switch to that if it does and so on. And with deduplication, runtimes and stuff share the parts that are common to both afaik.
It’s a bit more complicated than just shoving everything in but also it’s less work than same thing having to be packaged separately for every distro.
Why not containerise everything? You need libreoffice? No problem, here is a docker or podman container.
Flatpak is basically GUI-optimized containers. It uses the same technology (namespaces) as docker and podman, just with some extra tools to make GUI-related things work properly. That’s why flatpak apps don’t use the system’s gtk version – they’re running in a sandbox with a different rootfs. You can spawn a shell into the sandbox of a specific app with
flatpak run --command=sh com.yourapp.YourAppand poke around it if you want to.It uses bubblewrap for sandboxing under the hood, right?
Thx, looks like that’s the info I’ve missed.
If you’re interested in another approach to containerizing GUI applications, also checkout out x11docker. It’s a small independent project maintained by one guy, nothing big like flatpak, but also pretty cool. The name is actually a bit limiting – it supports both docker and podman, and can run wayland apps as well. One of the coolest features, in my opinion, is the ability to run a separate X server inside every sandbox and forward individual windows to the “host” X server. That way you can prevent apps from spying on your keyboard or other apps’ windows.
I used to use flatpak for everything, but I just dont have the hard drive space to store duplicates of my graphics drivers.
Oh come on, mesa is only (checks) 112 megabytes!
you know what, carry on!
Last I recall, my drivers for Flatpak took up an extra 20 gigs of my 256 gig hard drive.
at 112 megabytes per instance that amounts to about 178 flatpaks. Which sounds pretty standard
Unpopular opinion: snap is not so bad and genuinely useful for many things
I would rather have a snap than building from source or use some tar.gz archive with a sketchy install script
some tar.gz archive with a sketchy install script
I just can’t… like maybe I’m too old and that’s why I still can’t wrap my head around how we went from “./configure && make & make install scripts are almost the de facto way to install software in linux” to “a sketchy install script”. We’re living interesting times at Linux
