this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
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By choice or by force? I'll take flatpaks over Appimages and literally rocks over snaps, but what is this metric actually saying?
It is saying that more than one million people are actively using Flathub. What do you mean by force?
Well if there's an application that the developer only releases a flatpak for, do I have a choice in being one of those million if there's no easy way to compile it myself? What if I'm a newbie linuxer and cannot get all the dev tools installed?
what's your point? if flatpak makes it easier for developers to package their software and easier for users to install it, there's nothing wrong with it being famous
What do you currently do if a developer doesn't package their software for other distros? Maybe they only provide an AUR package or a .deb, so someone else has to package it.
With flatpak the only difference is that a distro independent package exists, that anyone can install. It being possible to do cross-distro apps with a single package doesn't make it any harder for distros to also package it.
I'm not arguing against flatpaks I'm just calling the number suspect to meaningless as a metric.
Thanks, I think I understand now what you mean. I still disagree on the notion that people are forced to use flatpak and that the number is meaningless because of that. People choose to use flatpak because it solves their problem.
I'd say it's similar to many people who use Ubuntu because of its big user base and software support. It's still an achievement to be recognized.
Anyway, I do agree that the number itself isn't really relevant. I'm pretty tired and maybe I'm a bit pedantic, so good night (or have a nice day, depending on your timezone).
There are no cases of this that I know of. There are some developers that don't encourage repackaging their apps, though.
You always have a choice. Just yesterday, I had an app's documentation say "install brew so you can download our application and themes". I noped right out of there and found a different application altogether.
I don't think there's any business entity artificially forcing the users to use it (like Firefox on Ubuntu 😉) if that's you're asking.
Otherwise, the only case where the user is "forced" to use flatpak would be when the software they're looking for is not available under their distro's repo, which happens a lot especially in point release distros.