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This debate will never die, but while people have been complaining about it, Flatpak has quietly just become a better way to package software for end users. My

This debate will never die, but while people have been complaining about it, Flatpak has quietly just become a better way to package software for end users. My criteria is that I'm a user, I don't care about what's elegant to developers -- and I have fewer problems with Flatpak than I have with non-Flatpak software. The vast majority of Flatpak problems I do have as a user come down to sandboxing permissions that I actually quite appreciate. The (very) few architectural problems are problems I would have had with other bundling systems too. "Developers are lazy" -> No, no user ever wants to debug dependency issues, and developers can't get rid of dependency issues. This feels like a repeat of the Rust debates where C developers kept complaining that good developers just don't have memory errors. Okay whatever you're very talented, congratulations; but most software isn't written by people who can reliably support multiple distros and lowering the skill requirements to maintain software is good actually because I use hobby projects all the time. Even outside of hobby communities, GoG's Linux installer is so borked that half of the time it's easier to install the Windows versions of the games and run them through Wine (because then you can use Bottles which provides dependency isolation). And I am completely convinced that dependency management is the problem -- Flatpak apps don't have these issues, at least not nearly as many. I'm not saying everything should be a Flatpak, but certainly at the very least most Linux games should be, anything that's graphical that isn't being distributed through an official package manager is a good candidate to at least consider Flatpak. I'm always grateful when I can install a graphical app through Flatpak instead of AUR. Is it the future? Flatpak critics spend a lot of time bashing Flatpak and very little time proposing equivalent fixes or acknowledging why Flatpak exists in the first place. If those issues were solved and the solutions popularized on mainline distros, maybe Flatpak wouldn't be the future. But I'm not holding my breath. This article proposes GoG's system as an alternative and says the existing problems are minor and easy to solve. 2 years later, I have literally never gotten a GoG native Linux installer to run without problems on the Steam deck. I'm not even saying it has to Flatpak, but whatever system you want to propose (Snap, AppImage, whatever) very clearly dependency isolation is better for end users and results in fewer bugs. "It takes up too much space" just isn't a real critique when the alternative being proposed almost universally fails to run on my hardware.

prmoustache 3y ago
I don't know, the only flatpak packaged application I tried to use today is crashing at startup and it just makes it more annoying to debug and do an actual bug report. https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/debugging.html https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/debugging.html An average user would just say that app is shit, linux is shit, I go back to windows!
- danShumway 3y ago
  I guess millage may vary, the only thing I can say is that there are multiple instances (particularly GoG which the article seems to praise) that literally never work on some of my systems. The few times I've run into Flatpak crashes, they're architecture problems that would have been present in any version of the app, so I'd be doing that work regardless. They're harder to debug in Flatpak, but also heck debugging crashes every time I try to install a piece of software. I'll happily take the added complexity of needing to boot a shell into the sandbox if it means I get to debug 50% fewer problems (and in practice Flatpak tends to reduce my number of issues by way more than 50%). The average user is never going to open a debugger, minimizing the number of crashes is more important for that user than making the crashes easier to debug.
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    But on the other hand, app crashes aren't something that common on linux. I mean at least on my distro. Whenever I have an app available as rpm, I choose the rpm over the flatpak version, for space saving purpose mostly. None of my apps crashes except one. And that is a piece of shit of a proprietary app that is not packaged by the distro maintainers: Microsoft Edge.
    - danShumway 3y ago
      > But on the other hand, app crashes aren't something that common on linux. I mean at least on my distro Strong disagree, my experience is that app crashes are extremely common on Linux if you step outside of official repositories; I say this as someone who literally only runs Linux and nothing else. I'm not necessarily saying Windows is better but... it's not like nothing ever breaks. It's impressive how well developers are able to hold it all together, but my experience is that Linux systems are fragile the moment anyone stops actively managing the dependencies and putting in the work to compile everything to match. > that is not packaged by the distro maintainers It is not feasible or scalable for Linux for every single app (even every Open Source app) to be distributed and managed by the distro maintainers. And this is what I'm getting at with dependency isolation -- the vast majority of crashes and bugs I see on Linux (and I mean by a massive margin) are all due to dependency mismatches and shared dependencies. A lot of Linux software is generally stable if the system looks like what it's expecting the system to look like. But if you're not going through an official repository where a bunch of volunteers are putting in the work to make it consistent, then it very often doesn't look like what developers expect. This is why people run games through Wine instead of using the Linux versions -- it's not because it's impossible to build good native versions, it's because if they don't use the Linux version they can use Bottles. That's the biggest reason; it's about the dependency isolation.

prmoustache 3y ago

I don't know, the only flatpak packaged application I tried to use today is crashing at startup and it just makes it more annoying to debug and do an actual bug report. https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/debugging.html https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/debugging.html An average user would just say that app is shit, linux is shit, I go back to windows!

danShumway 3y ago
I guess millage may vary, the only thing I can say is that there are multiple instances (particularly GoG which the article seems to praise) that literally never work on some of my systems. The few times I've run into Flatpak crashes, they're architecture problems that would have been present in any version of the app, so I'd be doing that work regardless. They're harder to debug in Flatpak, but also heck debugging crashes every time I try to install a piece of software. I'll happily take the added complexity of needing to boot a shell into the sandbox if it means I get to debug 50% fewer problems (and in practice Flatpak tends to reduce my number of issues by way more than 50%). The average user is never going to open a debugger, minimizing the number of crashes is more important for that user than making the crashes easier to debug.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  But on the other hand, app crashes aren't something that common on linux. I mean at least on my distro. Whenever I have an app available as rpm, I choose the rpm over the flatpak version, for space saving purpose mostly. None of my apps crashes except one. And that is a piece of shit of a proprietary app that is not packaged by the distro maintainers: Microsoft Edge.
  - danShumway 3y ago
    > But on the other hand, app crashes aren't something that common on linux. I mean at least on my distro Strong disagree, my experience is that app crashes are extremely common on Linux if you step outside of official repositories; I say this as someone who literally only runs Linux and nothing else. I'm not necessarily saying Windows is better but... it's not like nothing ever breaks. It's impressive how well developers are able to hold it all together, but my experience is that Linux systems are fragile the moment anyone stops actively managing the dependencies and putting in the work to compile everything to match. > that is not packaged by the distro maintainers It is not feasible or scalable for Linux for every single app (even every Open Source app) to be distributed and managed by the distro maintainers. And this is what I'm getting at with dependency isolation -- the vast majority of crashes and bugs I see on Linux (and I mean by a massive margin) are all due to dependency mismatches and shared dependencies. A lot of Linux software is generally stable if the system looks like what it's expecting the system to look like. But if you're not going through an official repository where a bunch of volunteers are putting in the work to make it consistent, then it very often doesn't look like what developers expect. This is why people run games through Wine instead of using the Linux versions -- it's not because it's impossible to build good native versions, it's because if they don't use the Linux version they can use Bottles. That's the biggest reason; it's about the dependency isolation.