.deb is 20 years old and represent 20+ years of software breaking every Debian version update. apt-get and .deb should kept as legacy feature for nerds who want it. Ubuntu/Mint's GUI software channel should be entirely based on flatpak, snap and appimage.
Debian's ancient repository/installation system and it's equals is one reason why Linux still sucks and why many desktop professionals avoid it. Sure it's easier to maintain system wide software updates but it has a lot of trade offs that hurt non-tech savy users that actually use Linux to get work done. It forces them to be slaves to short-term repositories. It encourages cancerous behavior like distro-hopping and use of unstable rapid release meme distros and virtual box's hogging up all the RAM just so they can have specific software they want.
I shouldn't have to update my OS (Ubuntu 18.04 LTS) to use the latest version of a program until at least 2023. Further more I should be free to downgrade to an earlier version of a program if I like. Software I ran ten years ago on Ubuntu 8.04 (2008) should still be compatible on Ubuntu 18.04 (2018), because I am using software to get work done and I may need to use discontinued software because it still "just werks" and in the shitty world of Linux where software pools are small I need as much options as possible. Hardly anyone's get paid to maintain FOSS software. So why force them to work harder to deal with updates breaking everything in six months?
Flatpak, appimage and even bundling files in a Tar.gz make upgrade/downgrade and specialized software acquirement a whole lot easier. It insures both future and reverse compatibility for a long time. When I use Linux and iToddler OSX I feel like a slave to a repository/app store. Appimage, flatpak and tar.gz bundles make me feel like I fucking own my computer.
Flatpak is great for sure. I hope Flathub gets some much needed improvements. Discover also includes flatpaks now. Maybe it just needs more and better repos though. But I guess make your posts shorter OP.
There's quite a bit of bloat in the runtimes tho. Like on my machine, 2G for only 2 --app's. Consider installing things from you're remotes with the --user flag, so it's in ~ instead of /. You know, like if / and ~ are separate partitions. $ du -shc .var .local/share/flatpak/ .cache/flatpak/ 19M .var 1.8G .local/share/flatpak/ 8.0K .cache/flatpak/ 1.8G total
Cameron Morgan
That's 2 gnome apps on a kde box btw.
Brayden Thompson
flatpak, appimage and others fucking suck OP. compiling from source is the best and only option if it isn't available in the repository.
Gabriel Perez
>just throw dependency management out the window >just load every library 50 times in parallel into memory >use our weird format that needs a daemon running for fuckall reason fuck off
Xavier Powell
this but without the falseflagging parts
Brody Scott
not if you are missing a ton of dependencies that are long gone. Compile from source. Boot up a virtualbox and find all the missing dependencies on a obscure distro that had the software
Alexander Sanchez
flatpak's bloat only shows Unix was fundamentally flawed from the beginning and Windows .exe and dl's in a folder got it right from the start.
AppImage is still an alternative.
Charles Price
I loved some dude over on Alphabet's video website saying Fedora 30 Silverblue (or something like that) is the future. OStree system images and flatpaks. The best part is all the reboots, felt just like Win98.
Cooper Morales
Window's bloat only shows that flatpak's bloat is just as bad and that both are a shit approach to managing packages.
Linux' various more efficient package managers show how it is done.
Dominic Carter
If not maintained software breaks every 6-9 months of updates. 99% of linux software that has ever existed is lost forever unless dug up through an obscure distro on a VM.
A random .exe from 1998 has a decent chance of still working on Windows 10.
Jackson White
meh. If you want to install just a few gnome apps on an otherwise all kde machine, you're going to get that bloat as dependencies anyways. I'd rather it was on my 900G ~ partition, than my 25G / partition. appimages work good. If I wanted to run krita or digikam on a gnome box, I'd opt for an appimage. The kde flatpaks don't seem as developed still and the gnome ones. But then again flatpak has the advantage of cli updating. AFAIK there's no automated appimage updates yet. You need to manually check the download page for a newer version.
Easton King
> If not maintained software breaks every 6-9 months of updates. No, that's just Ubuntu. I've been running years older software on muh Gentoo (some stuff was installed in /usr/bin/local and thus not updated) and it worked just about forever.
> A random .exe from 1998 has a decent chance of still working on Windows 10. A statically compiled Linux binary too, but it's really just not necessary to run the 1998 version of it - better just run a x86_64 2019 compiled dynamically linked version.
Dylan Foster
>meh. If you want to install just a few gnome apps on an otherwise all kde machine, you're going to get that bloat as dependencies anyways. I would mainly have to install some QT and some KDE dependencies, yes, but not all of it.
More importantly, it doesn't make anything worse, and it runs better in just about any other case, so why do you actually need flatpak? Is it just to escape the Ubuntu maintainer's work?
> If I wanted to run krita or digikam on a gnome box, I'd opt for an appimage. Do as you must.
> But then again flatpak has the advantage of cli updating. Even with that: Still a shittier version of nix/guix as far as I'm concerned.
Nathan Torres
Things have gotten much better from several years ago but this is still true. Linux doesn't have much software choice for specific task, most of the time it's just THE SOFTWARE. Instead of competition with dozens of image manipulation software competing it's just THE GIMP.
The reality is competition is a good thing, Windows has a dozens of programs that do exactly the same task so if one sucks you are not stuck with the same shit choice. With Linux the only thing is true if it's a fork of shit software with the same underlying bugs. All the competing software to a popular program are slightly modified forks of it.
Josiah Lopez
> Linux doesn't have much software choice for specific task Very wrong. Most tasks have got a greater number of alternatives than any other OS. How many filesystems do you have on Windows, three? Heh.
>Instead of competition with dozens of image manipulation software competing it's just THE GIMP. Uh no, there is a dozen and most obviously Krita.
Blake Price
>Debian >for whatever reason I need a newer version of a software, and stable is over a year old >ask aptitude to download the unstable version >aptitude fistfucks itself and install is broken beyond repair forever
And people say Ubuntu is the shit one.
Liam Murphy
Small size FOSS devs will never keep up with maintaining the same software on the latest debian, redhat, arch and open suse. They will struggle even more with your rolling release distro breaking their software every 6 months.
Keep biting the hand that feeds you.
Ian Wright
>I am demonstrating my horrible lack of knowledge about every single thing ever on a public forum but at least no one knows who i am so it's ok which means i'm basically trolling Thread over.
Ian Kelly
Many projects that did this easily. Don't run the most broken ass build scripting and it's no real effort to just version bump upstream's build scripting.
If Apt is too retarded for your project, just let Ubuntu handle their own shit.
