Its even worse when you force Firefox to use wayland its icon doesn’t even show.
Edit: Oh since everyone now is confused; I only have the flatpak version of Firefox installed yet it doesn’t use the pinned icon and doesn’t even use the firefox icon under wayland at all.
The whole concept is incredibly ugly
Depends on the viewpoint. As a software consumer, sure. As a software producer though, not having to deal with with tons of different packaging formats and repositories for different distributions and versions is a blessing.
Am a developer and I can very much agree on package managers have nasty configuration, but at the same time flatpak is the exact same thing. No different that any other package. Except now you have to learn yet another standard that’s even less popular than major ones. You can even claim it’s easier, but the fact remains it’s not the defacto standard, so you still have to provide other packages as well as flatpak if you wish to do so.
flatpak isn’t the same because you only have to learn one packaging format and can distribute to virtually any system out there. I really don’t see why you’d also package for every distro individually then. Installing flatpak isn’t that hard, it not being “the defacto standard” shouldn’t be an issue.
It wastes resources on the consumer side to free up resources on the developer side, allowing for more time spent on improving the software instead of worrying about millions of different system setup combinations.
Pretty much typical these days. Developers will often use metric tons of middleware hell to avoid writing one function or using native library. What’s that, GTK or Qt require few days to learn. Naah, I’ll just include whole browser with my application and write interface in HTML/CSS. Who cares about people’s configuration, accessibility needs, battery life, screen readers, etc.
There are of course two sides of the story, and you are right that it causes performance/battery life issues. Including a browser does actually improve the situation with screen readers and such.
The big advantage of the “include a browser/large framework” solution is that it allows you to write the application once and use it on web, Linux, Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, some weird TV OS, a game console or someone’s car.
Without some middleware you’d be writing 10 different versions and every one would need it’s own native libraries that are “just a few days to learn” and “just a few dozen days to master” and only “a few hundred hours to implement and maintain”, and the result would be what we had in the 2000s: “Sorry, we do not support Linux.”
You aren’t owed a native package for whatever OS you’re using. In fact, you should be thankful that flatpak exists because the most common alternative is piping wget into shell.
And if you care so much about security, just build your stuff from source. Whether flatpak or apt, at some point you will run third-party code.
What do you know about someone on the other side of the keyboard, nothing 🙄
Hope it helps you be annoyed at me because I don’t like flatpak and snap.
