Linux

I use SystemD binary Gentoo with Flatpaks. Sue me.

I have used rpms, AppImages, Flatpaks, and source. I have even used a snap or two when I had no other choice.

If you can't work with them all, can you even say you Linux Bro?

?? I manage flatpaks exclusively in the terminal

Certainly a fan, and I don't understand the hate towards it.

Flatpaks are my preferred way of installing Linux apps, unless it is a system package, or something that genuinely requires extensive permissions like a VPN client, or something many other apps depend on like Wine.

The commonly cited issues with Flatpaks are:

• Performance. Honestly, do you even care if your Pomodoro timer app takes up 1 more megabyte of RAM? Do you actually notice?
• Bloat. Oh, yes, an app now takes 20 MB instead of 10 MB. Again, does anybody care?
• Slower and larger updates. Could be an issue for someone on a metered traffic, or with very little time to do updates. Flatpaks update in the background, though, and you typically won't notice the difference unless you need something newest now (in which case you'll have to wait an extra minute)
• Having to check permissions. This is a feature, not a bug. For common proponents of privacy and security, Linuxheads grew insanely comfortable granting literally every maintainer full access to their system. Flatpaks intentionally limit apps functionality to what is allowed, and if in some case defaults aren't good for your use case - just toggle a switch in Flatseal, c'mon, you don't need any expertise to change it.

What you gain for it? Everything.

• Full control over app's permissions. Your mail client doesn't need full system permissions, and neither do your messengers. Hell, even your backup client only needs to access what it backs up.
• All dependencies built in. You'll never have to face dependency hell, ever, no matter what. And you can be absolutely sure the app is fully featured and you won't have to look for missing nonessential dependencies.
• Fully distro-agnostic. If something works on my EndeavourOS, it will work on my OpenSUSE Slowroll, and on my Debian 12. And it will be exactly the same thing, same version, same features. It's beautiful.
• Stability. Flatpaks are sandboxed, so they don't affect your system and cannot harm it in any way. This is why immutable distros feature Flatpaks as the main application source. Using them with mutable distributions will also greatly enhance stability.

Alternatives?

AppImages don't need an installation, so they are nice to see what the program is about. But for other uses, they are garbage-tier. Somehow they manage both not to integrate with the system and not be sandboxed, you need manual intervention or additional tools to at least update them/add to application menu, and ultimately, they depend on one file somewhere. This is extremely unreliable and one should likely never use AppImages for anything but "use and delete".

Snaps...aside from all the controversy about Snap Store being proprietary and Ubuntu shoving snaps down people's throats, they were just never originally developed with desktop applications in mind. As a result, Snaps are commonly so much slower and bulkier that it actually starts getting very noticeable. Permissions are also way less detailed, meaning you can't set apps up with minimum permissions for your use case.

This all leaves us with one King:

And it is Flatpak.

Personally I am okay with them actually. I use several on my system and having each app allowed to have different permissions is super useful.

But also I like things that are directly installed cause they seem just a tad faster performance wise.

I like flatpak, but I can't download Flathub flatpak applications and (specially) Flathub flatpak runtimes from my phone. I hope Flathub learns from F-Droid

There was a few years where I pretty much only used Flatpaks because I was scared of the terminal. But now that I've learned how to use the terminal, it's so much more convenient because I can quickly update all my applications all in one place without having to open a separate app. Plus, some Flatpaks can fall really behind on software updates.

There might be a Linux userbase someday where no one other than developers actually knows how to use the terminal, because users can run everything they want without a command line, but maybe that's actually a good thing because it'll drive up how many people use a Linux distro.

With Windows and Mac, there's a shareholder incentive to enshittify. With Linux, if a distro goes bad and gets commercialized, there's always another distro people can move to, not to mention there's no financial incentive. The more people get on Linux, the less power these tech companies have. Personally, that and privacy are what drew me to Linux much more so than being able to tinker or fine-tune my experience.

I'm not a huge fan of Flatpaks, they're a lot harder to distribute offline versus something like AppImage. Seriously, you have to like create an offline repository, then create a bundle, and it's like 6 or 7 steps, it's honestly kind of ridiculous lol but other than that they seem fine, and they're easy enough to update (but so are apt packages)

I know some people may say "oh why do you need that", but Linux has taught me that my computer is my own, and I should be able to use it the way I want to. I shouldn't have to fight with my package manager to get it to do what I want. So I guess you could say, no I'm not really a fan of Flatpaks.

Personally, I didn't mind Snaps, but I'm getting kind of really fed up with especially for-profit companies etc so I don't like Snap that much now either.

Apt packages are nice, but the more of them you have installed, especially if you're using Ubuntu-based distros and have lots of PPAs, the more annoying upgrading your distro version can be because of all the dependencies and cross-dependencies.

AppImage tends to just work for me, as long as it's not compiled with a newer libc-bin version than the distro I'm currently using has, and I really enjoy that it's just one file I can copy and run pretty much anywhere.

Flatpaks are good, especially compared to snap.

The future is atomic OS's like silverblue, which will make heavy use of things like flatpak.

I love installing things from the CLI and prefer to only do it that way but Linux needs a single click install method for applications if it’s ever going to become a mainstream OS. The average person just wants to Google a program, hit download and install. If not that then they want to use a mobile-like App Store.

Flatpak is kind of perfect at achieving both those things

I don’t really care about all these different things, as long as none of them become a crazy confusing mess, like Windows DLLs.

iit: nerds unable to comprehend that building a piece of software from source in not something every person can do.

EDIT: or doesn’t want to do

I like the idea of them because I don't like dealing with dependencies changing and breaking stuff and I don't really care too much about disk space in the context of non-game desktop apps, as I don't tend to install lots of them.

That being said I absolutely hate that permissions are all over the place and flatpak doesn't ship a GUI to manage them by default, nor do you get any indication as to what permissions a program has until you try some functionality (like filesystem or camera access) only to find out it doesn't work out of the box.

What’s a flatpak? Is that like a worse NixOS package? I prefer NixOS, BTW.

Cursed solution to a cursed problem 🤷