6mo ago

Flatpak haters seem to believe that if an app isn't on their distro's repos, it's the developers' fault.

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If I can choose between flatpack and distro package, distro wins hands down.
If the choice then is flatpack vs compile your own, I think I'll generally compile it, but it depends on the circumstances.
- Why?
  
  Because it's easier to use the version that's in the distro, and why do I need an extra set of libraries filling up my disk.
  I see flatpack as a last resort, where I trade disk space for convenience, because you end up with a whole OS worth of flatpack dependencies (10+ GB) on your disk after a few upgrade cycles.
  
  Is compiling it yourself with the time and effort that it costs worth more than a few GB of disk space?
  Then your disk is very expensive and your labor very cheap.
  
  For a lot of project "compiling yourself", while obviously more involved than running some magic install command, is really not that tedious. Good projects have decent documentation in that regard and usually streamline everything down to a few things to configure and be done with it.
  What's aggravating is projects that explicitly go out of their way to make building them difficult, removing existing documentation and helper tools and replacing them with "use whatever we decided to use". I hate these.
  
  I should have noted that I'll compile myself when we are talking about something that should run as a service on a server.
  
  99% of the time it's just "make && sudo make install" or something like that. Anything bigger or more complicated typically has a native package anyway.
  
  They didn't say anything about compiling it themselves, just that they prefer native packages to flatpak
  edit: I can't read
  
  2 comments up they said
  If the choice then is flatpack vs compile your own, I think I'll generally compile it, but it depends on the circumstances.
  
  I mean it's 2024. I regularly download archives that are several tens or even over 100 GB and then completely forget they're sitting on my drive, because I don't notice it when the drive is 4TB. Last time I cared about 10GB here and there was in the late-2000s.
  
  Great that you have 4tb on your root partition then by all means use flatpack.
  I have 256Gb on my laptop, as I recall I provisioned about 40-50gigs to root.
  
  I'm sorry. I didn't realize people were still regularly using such constrained systems. Honest. I've homebuilt my PCs for the last 15 years.
  
  🤣
  
  Why not upgrade your hdd?
  
  flatpak has dedub, so no
  
  Yep that's all well and good, but what flatpack doesn't do automatically is clean up unused libs/dependencies, over time you end up with several versions of the same libs. When the apps are upgraded they get the latest version of their dependency and leave the old behind.
  
  TEN WHOLE GIGABYTES!! OMG WHAT ARE WE TO DO??
  
  10 out of 40 is 25%
  10 out of 4000 is 0.25%
  
  I don't know what dependencies he has but my 3 year old system that is constantly being updated is full of flatpaks and all of the dependencies combined are only around 3GB. People see 1GB of dependencies and lose their mind.
  
  Stubbornness
  
  Based
- I'm 100% on this camp.
- I change my opinion depending on which app it is. I use KDE, so any KDE app will be installed natively for sure for perfect integration. Stuff like grub costumizer etc all native. Steam, Lutris, GIMP, Discord, chrome, firefox, telegram? Flatpak, all of those. They don't need perfect integration and I prefer the stability, easy upgrades and ease of uninstall of flatpak. Native is used when OS integration is a must. Flatpak for everything else. Especially since sometimes the distro's package is months/years old... prefering distro packages for everything should be a thing of the past.

200 comments