I’m admittedly yelling at cloud a bit here, but I like package managers just fine. I don’t want to have to have a plurality of software management tools. However, I also don’t want to be caught off guard in the future if applications I rely on begin releasing exclusively with flatpak.

I don’t develop distributed applications, but Im not understanding how it simplifies dependency management. Isn’t it just shifting the work into the app bundle? Stuff still has to be updated or replaced all the time, right?

Don’t maintainers have to release new bundles if they contain dependencies with vulnerabilities?

Is it because developers are often using dependencies that are ahead of release versions?

Also, how is it so much better than images for your applications on Docker Hub?

Never say never, I guess, but nothing about flatpak really appeals to my instincts. I really just want to know if it’s something I should adopt, or if I can continue to blissfully ignore.

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMEnglish
    4·
    6 days ago

    Downsides of distro pacakges:

    • someone needs to package an application for each distro
    • applications often need to maintain support for multiple versions of some of their dependencies to be able to continue to work on multiple distros
    • users of different distros use different versions of the application, creating more support work for upstream
    • users of some distros can’t use the application at all because there is no package
    • adding 3rd party package repos is dangerous; every package effectively gets root access, and in many cases every repo has the ability to replace any distro-provided package by including one with a higher version number. 3rd party repos bring the possibility of breaking your system through malice or incompetence.

    Downsides of flatpak:

    • application maintainers are responsible for shipping and updating their dependencies, and may be less competent at doing timely security updates than distro security teams
    • more disk space is used by applications potentially bringing their own copies of the same dependencies

    🤔

    • gnuhaut@lemmy.ml
      3·
      5 days ago

      Another downside of flatpak is that I don’t trust upstream devs to have my best interests at heart, but I trust Debian developers far more. I’ve seen upstream do some annoying or stupid shit and the Debian maintainers not budging.

      I think it was poppler or evince that decided they were going to enforce the no-copy-and-paste bit you can set on pdfs. Debian patched it out. I’ve seen Mozilla decide they were going to enforce their trademarks. They carved out special exceptions for various distros but that still would have meant you would have to rename Firefox if you were to fork Debian. Debian had none of it. There were many dodgy copyright and licensing problems upstream devs gave no shit about. Debian not including these often eventually put pressure on them to fix this shit or for some replacement to get developed.

      • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMEnglish
        3·
        5 days ago

        I trust Debian developers far more

        i definitely agree with you here :)

        I think it was poppler or evince that decided they were going to enforce the no-copy-and-paste bit you can set on pdfs. Debian patched it out.

        I found the notion of free software implementing PDF DRM rather hilarious, so I had to know more. First I found this help page which confirms that evince does have code which implements PDF restrictions, but it says that its override_restrictions option is enabled by default.

        But I wondered: when did this get implemented? and was it ever enabled by default? So, I went digging, and here are the answers:

        • in May 2005, the restrictions were implemented in evince in this commit
        • in September 2005, the override_restrictions option was added in this commit, after discussion in bug #305818
        • in December 2006 bug #382700 was opened, requesting that override_restrictions be enabled by default
        • in January 2008, the default changed in this commit - but only after someone pointed out that the PDF spec does not in fact require the restrictions to be enforced. (The spec says “It is up to the implementors of PDF consumer applications to respect the intent of the document creator by restricting user access”) 😂

        I don’t see any indication that Debian patched this out during the time when evince had it enabled by default, but I’m sure they would have eventually if GNOME hadn’t come to their senses :)

        I’ve seen Mozilla decide they were going to enforce their trademarks. They carved out special exceptions for various distros but that still would have meant you would have to rename Firefox if you were to fork Debian. Debian had none of it.

        In my opinion both sides of the Debian–Mozilla trademark dispute were actually pretty reasonable and certainly grounded in good intentions. Fortunately they resolved it eventually, with Mozilla relaxing their restrictions in 2016 (while still reserving the right to enforce their trademark against derivatives which make modifications they find unreasonable):

        Mozilla recognizes that patches applied to Iceweasel/Firefox don’t impact the quality of the product.

        Patches which should be reported upstream to improve the product always have been forward upstream by the Debian packagers. Mozilla agrees about specific patches to facilitate the support of Iceweasel on architecture supported by Debian or Debian-specific patches.

        More generally, Mozilla trusts the Debian packagers to use their best judgment to achieve the same quality as the official Firefox binaries.

        In case of derivatives of Debian, Firefox branding can be used as long as the patches applied are in the same category as described above.

        • gnuhaut@lemmy.ml
          1·
          5 days ago

          https://lwn.net/Articles/335415/

          The evince PDF reader ran into this issue back in 2005. It is now rare to find a distributor shipping a version of evince which implements copy restrictions. Xpdf implements copy restrictions unconditionally, but Debian patched that code out in 2002, and that patch has spread to other distributors as well. In general, as one would expect, free PDF readers tend not to implement this behavior. Okular is about the only exception that your editor can find; it’s interesting to note that the version of Okular shipped with Fedora Rawhide also implements copy restrictions by default. Perhaps this behavior is result of the relative newness of this application; as it accumulates more users, the pressure for more user-friendly behavior is likely to grow.

    • Caveman@lemmy.world
      1·
      5 days ago

      Many of the problems with security and disk space are limited by flatpaks using same base layer for applications that is shared and easy to update.

    • argon@lemmy.today
      3·
      6 days ago

      Another upside is the easy permission management.

      You can revoke network access from your password manager to reduce attack surface; you can revoke camera access from your chat app to prevent accidentaly enabling it; You can restrict an app’s file system access to prevent unwanted changes; etc.

      It’s not yet fit to protect from malicious apps, but it still finds some use.

  • pathief@lemmy.world
    2·
    6 days ago

    This is what’s so great about Linux, you can use whatever the hell you want.

    Flatpaks provide some cool security functionalities like revoking network access to a specific application. Maybe you care about this, maybe you don’t.

    My personal policy is to always install from the repos. Occasionally something is only available in flathub, which is fine for me. I really understand how hard is maintaining something for every single package manager and diatributions and totally respect the devs using a format that just works everywhere. If I were to release a new Linux app, I would totally use flatpak.

    • Baldur Nil@programming.dev
      2·
      5 days ago

      I really understand how hard is maintaining something for every single package manager and distributions

      But for apps distributed in your system’s package manager, it’s not the devs that are distributing them in every package manager. It’s the distribution itself that goes to each repository, checks and tests the dependencies they need and creates the package for the distribution, along with a compiled binary.

      When they aren’t offered in the distro’s package manager (or the version is outdated because the distro isn’t rolling release) things become more complicated indeed, and sometimes you can’t even do it because the dependencies are older than the ones you require.

  • d_k_bo@feddit.org
    2·
    6 days ago

    As someone who develops and distributes a small application exclusively on Flathub, I prefer that everyone uses the exact same package on every system. That way I know that if something doesn’t work, the issue should be easy to reproduce.

    Recently, there was a situation where a user indicated in the comments of a release announcement that a newly introduced feature “doesn’t work”. It turned out that they installed a third-party package from the AUR (that wasn’t updated yet) without knowing that this isn’t the official and up to date version.

    • LeFantome@programming.dev
      2·
      6 days ago

      It just has to always be the first question in a big report or forum question. Have they verified their issue with the Flatpak version?

      I prefer packages from the AUR myself but I do not expect the software authors to support me. Distros need to support their own packages but the AUR is not part of the Arch distro. Arch does not support the AUR. The only support I should expect would be from the package author (the AUR package) and they likely do not have the ability.

      I think the right way to understand Flatpak is that it is essentially its own Linux distro without a kernel. You have to be running that version if you expect support. People think of Flatpak as a “sandbox” which it is. But it is also like running an app in a Docker container or Distrobox where you have to pick a distro to run in the container. With Flatpak, you are running on the “freedesktop” distro. It is not the same environment as the rest of your system (right down to the filesystem layout and C library).

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      6 days ago

      This seems to be a dependency failure.

      I’m sad that we had this solved 20 years ago. It’s like Texas measles.

      • Mayoman68@lemmy.world
        1·
        6 days ago

        What do you mean by this? Flatpak definitely solved the Linux distro balkanization problem for application developers without trying to destroy the benefits of having different distros. Having a distinction between system software, utilities, and advanced end user applications does solve a problem.

  • Decker108@lemmy.ml
    2·
    6 days ago

    Sure you can! Just run alias flatpak=snap and you’ll be golden.

    (I’ll show myself out…)

  • hollyberries@programming.dev
    2·
    6 days ago

    Is it because developers are often using dependencies that are ahead of release versions?

    That has been my experience recently. I had the same mindset as you until a critical piece of software I use shat the bed on Arch (LiveCaptions) that affected my being able to watch training videos for work.

    Because it was time critical and I didn’t feel like possibly breaking other things for one package, I grabbed the flatpak. It came with its own nvidia driver package (mine was newer) and it worked out of the box without having to mess with anything and that was enough to change my hardline view on that.

    Now it’s just another tool to use in an emergency when important things randomly break.

  • Sickday@kbin.earth
    2·
    6 days ago

    I don’t develop distributed applications, but Im not understanding how it simplifies dependency management. Isn’t it just shifting the work into the app bundle? Stuff still has to be updated or replaced all the time, right?

    That’s correct. This simplifies the dependency management system because not every distribution ships with every version of every package, so when software requires a version of a package that the distro dosesn’t ship with or have in its repositories, the end user has to either build the package from source, or find some other way to run their software. Flatpaks developers will define the versions of dependencies that are required for an application to run and that exact version is pulled in when the flatpak is installed. This makes the issue of every distro not having every version of every package moot.

    Don’t maintainers have to release new bundles if they contain dependencies with vulnerabilities?

    They don’t have to, no. But they absolutely should.

    Is it because developers are often using dependencies that are ahead of release versions?

    Sometimes, yes. Or the software is using a dependency that is so old that it’s no longer included in a distro’s package repositories.

    Also, how is it so much better than images for your applications on Docker Hub?

    I would say they’re suited to different purposes.

    Docker shines when availability is a concern and replication is desired. It’s fantastic for running a swarm of applications spread across multiple machines automatically managing their lifecycles based on load. In general though, I wouldn’t use Docker containers to run graphical applications. Most images are not suited for this by default, and would require you install a bunch of additional packages before you could consider running any graphical apps. Solutions to run graphical applications in Docker do exist (see x11docker), but it doesn’t really seem like a common practice.

    Flatpaks are designed to integrate into an existing desktops that already have a graphical environment running. Some flatpaks include the packages required for hardware acceleration (Steam, OBS) which can eliminate the need for those packages to be available via your distro’s package manager.

    What this means is that a distro like Alpine Linux that doesn’t have an nvidia package in its repos can still run Steam because the Steam flatpak includes the nvidia driver if you have an nvidia GPU installed.

    Never say never, I guess, but nothing about flatpak really appeals to my instincts. I really just want to know if it’s something I should adopt, or if I can continue to blissfully ignore.

    ¯_(ツ)_/¯ It’s a tool. Use it when it’s useful, or don’t.

    • krakenfury@lemmy.sdf.orgOPEnglish
      1·
      6 days ago

      Thanks for the detailed answer. I think I have a clearer picture of the problems it’s trying to solve and the solutions it’s delivering.

      It also now seems connected to immutable distros I’ve heard about recently. So I guess the idea there is that the OS is just a tiny core set of libraries that never have to change, then the applications have their dependencies bundled, instead of requiring them as system dependencies.

      I’m not convinced it’s something I want as a user, but more importantly not something I need.

      From a development perspective, it seems downright seductive, allowing almost total freedom of opinion.

  • warmaster@lemmy.world
    2·
    7 days ago

    You’re just not the target user.

    The whole OCI mindset is geared towards absolute noobs like me, and cloud native devs that develop inside containers on a daily basis.

    Take me for example. I use Bazzite, it’s the first distro I couldn’t break. On top of that, flatpaks, appimages and brew are my only options for software. Since Bazzite is an atomic distro (think immutable ) I could also use Distrobox but I don’t want to deal with it.

    Everything just works for me, I don’t care about anything. I broke so many distros before. Sure, I don’t control every nut and cranny but I don’t want to.

    If you know how to not break your stuff then that’s great, but I don’t, and I don’t want to learn that. I just want to learn other things.

    • AmbiguousProps@lemmy.todayEnglish
      0·
      6 days ago

      Not to be that person, but you aren’t restricted to those solutions for software, that’s what rpm-ostree is there for. It layers applications over your system image and installs software in a similar manner to a “normal” package manager.

      • notanapple@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        6 days ago

        rpm-ostree is intended to be the last resort because layering causes issues with updates and other things

    • skilltheamps@feddit.org
      1·
      6 days ago

      Only if the application source code fits the API of the library versions on your system. Otherwise you also need to port the application to your available library versions. Also using different dependency versions might surface bugs that you have to sort out yourself.

      I only want to point this out because it often seems that the people that complain about flatpak do not grasp what maintaining a package entails, and your suggestion effectively puts you in the position of being a package maintaier for your specific distro. (But the upshot is that with open source software you are always free to do this, and also share it with other people through (community-) repositories)

  • kixik@lemmy.ml
    1·
    6 days ago

    FLOSS used to include the ability to build software. Perhaps that’s not important anymore but now a days some developers don’t attend problems with their build recipes because they only consider what they release through binaries, whether on flatpak or whatever other binary repository they like. At least I dislike that, it’s ok to me some or most users would prefer to grab a bloated binary rather than building anything, but that doesn’t mean forgetting about those actually wanting to build from source, or wanting to use shared libraries and software from their distros, actually that’s a requirement for free/libre software repositories. Not sure if the tendency is to move the gnu+linux users into app stores like the ones on windows, now ubuntu snaps, android play store and the like. Sure there’s more security with sandboxing, but nothing one can’t get with firejail, and if wanting MAC as well then firejail + apparmor for example.

    At any rate, just my little rant. And if you’re wondering, I use AUR on Artix, and I really hope I won’t have a need for a flatpak stuff.

  • jokeyrhyme@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    6 days ago

    Can I ignore flatpak indefinitely?

    Sure, at least until software you want to use is flatpak only, e.g. Bottles

  • Emma Liv@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    6 days ago

    Just as my two cents, as a user - I like flatpaks because I can have up to date versions of certain applications on a more stable Debian base. I also like that application configs all go in one spot (~/.var/app/com.Example.example), and having granular permissions management per application. As for immutable distros, I’d happily use one if I wasn’t already getting all the stability I need from LMDE :)

  • N.E.P.T.R@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    1·
    7 days ago

    I personally like flatpak and its build system. Flatpak applications are sandboxed by default and don’t require root during any part of installation, reducing the risk of malicious/broken software damaging the host. They also are available for basically any base distro, meaning i can use the same apps if a ever distrohop and i can even just copy over the config folders as if nothing happened.

  • toastal@lemmy.ml
    0·
    5 days ago

    Just use Nix. It can run all the packages on whatever platform. It has the largest repository of software & are some of the most up-to-date.

  • Churbleyimyam@lemm.ee
    0·
    6 days ago

    If your distro provides everything you need then I would avoid flatpak. Getting apps to speak to each other is a pain, updates use more data, backups and restores take much longer, they don’t perform as well and config files are not necessarily where you expect them to be.

    I have Debian Stable on an older laptop and only install apps as flatpaks if they are not available otherwise. I also have a very new laptop with Fedora on it (because it needs a newer kernel) and have had to install more flatpaks just to make things work properly, because they include their dependencies, codecs etc which are missing in Fedora. Appimages seem to do this too and I find them preferable to flatpak because they integrate more predictably with my system. Apps are slower to launch though and have to be manually updated.

    Like you, I’d prefer to just have a package manager and a single source of software and plan to go back to Debian when my newer machine is supported by it.