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What is the point of Flatpak, AppImage, Snap, etc? (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I don't understand what problem they are meant to solve. If you have a FOSS piece of software, you can install it via the package manager. Or the store, which is just a frontend for the package manager. I see that they are distribution-independent, but the distro maintainers likely already know what's compatible and what your system needs to install the software. You enjoy that benefit only through the package manager.

If your distro ships broken software because of dependency problems, you don't need a tool like Flatpak, you need a new distro.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Just a shot in the dark, but it sounds like you have never maintained software. If you have, then my apologies, but your experience must not have included much by way of dependency and version management. Dependencies and versions are a major source of headache for any software engineer and it’s a problem of our own making.

Having completely self-contained applications, while more bloated, makes maintenance and distribution exceedingly simpler and puts the burden of managing that solely on the developer of said application instead of burdening everyone down the line.

I remember when package managers didn’t exist. It was painful. This is the next step in the evolution of the Linux desktop that was mostly solved in Windows and effectively completely solved on macOS since some early 10.x version.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

I would not call it a next step. Just another option. The big downsides include much larger on block storage size and worse yet much bigger memory foot print since your app cannot benefit from shared images. Worse system integration too.

In a world where block storage is huge and cheap and memory too maybe less important. I would not say it is without issues though. Maybe convenient but not optimal in a lot of ways.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

From my understanding, Flatpak is built on top of OSTree, which will automatically deduplicate files across different packages. That said, I’m not sure if this extends to downloading packages. The site claims that it does do “delta updates,” which would hopefully mean that it doesn’t download files that are already on the system, even if they’re part of another package.

I’m just going off what I read in the docs. Someone with more understanding of the system can clarify.

[–] Still 1 points 1 year ago

it will deduplicate stuff but if you have dependency A v1.2 and A v1.3 for a different app they will both be there

delta updates refer to only downloading the parts of files that have changed, it reduces download time but may increase unpacking/patching time

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