Background-Story: I did a “flatpak update” on a remote client and every package wants the PW for downloading and for installing again. I had to enter the password like 30 times or more.
Background-Story: I did a “flatpak update” on a remote client and every package wants the PW for downloading and for installing again. I had to enter the password like 30 times or more.
I know a lot of people enjoy flatpak, and I enjoyed it for a couple apps that had annoying update processes in other package managers, but I’m really not impressed with it overall. Maybe it’s an unpopular opinion
I’m convinced most of flatpack’s popularity is just it not being snap. When one is meh but you actively dislike the other, “meh” starts to look pretty good. Or maybe I’m just projecting my own feelings.
They both solve a very similar set of problems and they each have their advantages, but canonical really managed to burn a lot of community goodwill with snap, so I’m just not willing to touch it personally (I also dislike having a hundred loop devices in my mounts).
Maybe I’m talking out my ass, but it seems to be something devs like because it makes their life easier.
Flatpak/snaps are always a hard miss for me as a user, unless there’s no other option.
For users it can mean a lot better app availability since not every distro has enough maintainers to have timely updates for all their repo packages and the maintainer obviously doesn’t want to maintain it for every single distro. Less work for maintainers/devs all around, with the benefit of better app availability to the user.
It seems to be something some devs like because they get annoyed when distro maintainers point out problems in their software or implement workarounds for those issues.
Given the shortage of people working on FOSS apps, I’m all in for anything that makes their lifes easier, so tgey can focus on the programming part and don’t have to care about packaging. That can be solved with community packaging like AUR, but that has it’s own problems.
But Flatpak is one of the technologies that explicitly has the developer deal with packaging, something they are usually quite bad at because they don’t do it very often, unlike distro maintainers.
Yes, but developers can create only flatpak, where they make sure it works and they officially support it, and then completely stop caring about other formats and community packages. Just like Bottles project does.
Citation needed
That seems to be the case every time developers package software in any way. Sometimes even if they don’t package it at all.
I’ll try to reword it so it’s clearer what I meant: I think developers shouldn’t have to maintain more than one package format, and I think flatpak is the best format to be the one supported by the developer officially. Many developers officially support only .deb for example.
I agree. I prefer using native package manager, nix in my case.
Maybe you have your own reasons for not being impressed with flatpak and you just didn’t list them, but this post is just OP blaming the flatpak CLI for not using sudo for him. There are things that flatpak doesn’t do well, but there’s currently not a single comment under this post listing any genuine drawbacks.
I really like it, I think it’s genuinely great