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.
I never intend to use a flatpak or snap, and avoid them like the plague. The whole concept is incredibly ugly to me, and wasteful of computer resources.
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.
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.
the only reason to use flatpaks is if your system doesnt come with a good package manager and repositories (pacman+aur, nix, etc), and dont want to build from source.
snaps, on the other hand, should be avoided at all costs imo.
Or if the repos contain outdated versions of the software. And yes, snaps are cancer, still cannot avoid them. 🥲
Could you elaborate on snaps? I’ve used them here and there and people seem to have really strong opinions on snap that I just don’t understand.
Tied to proprieatry backend, snap store looks like ass and runs like one, spawns loop devices that mess up the /mnt folder, tied to fake .deb packages that install snaps instead. Basically, a lot of proprieatry nonsense that St. Ignucius frowns upon.
Flatpak works great. I’m sorry you don’t know how to use a computer.
“hey guys, I’m having a problem with my Linux install that doesn’t seem very common–”
“YOU’RE STUPID AND I HATE YOU”
this is EXACTLY why Linux gurus have a bad rep. remember the human, for goodness’ sake. don’t act like you’ve never run into a strange problem in your entire computing life that required digging deep into some 2003 forum post to solve.
Flatpak … is still not great
ftfy
Yes. I do have some applications installed as flatpak. What’s the problem?
Just don’t use flatpaks… it’s a miserable experience all around
(and snaps are somehow even worse)
Why would you need another package manager next to the one supplied with the distro? The one that is supplied has packages that are tested and guaranteed to work (when on a stable release).
Yes, they are (sometimes very) outdated, but those packages are working. Additional package managers just add to the dependency hell (introducing bugs).
Flatpak is a last resort. Only used when the package is not available on the repository or the version is too out of sync with the environment. If I really really need to run the latest version of that software, it’s easy to run a Flatpak. But that is only and exclusively for final user software, never for services or background running application, or a new can of worms is opened.
It’s kinda one size fits all solution. It allows Devs to build their package one way and have it on pretty much every distro, which is a major sticking point for Linux apps. I don’t see why you would use a flatpaks if your distro has the software already though. I use flatpaks alot less now that I’ve moved to endeavour from fedora. The AUR is a godsend.
Also flatpak doesn’t add to dependency hell, the dependencies it installs are also flatpaks and are completely separate from the system. Recently the arch package of steam simply stopped launching proton games for some reason, I thought I messed something up on my system so I rolled to an old btrfs snapshot and it still didn’t work. However the flatpak version of steam just works.
what? They suck on ubuntu/debian-based distros like mint and pop os, they suck even more on arch, and i hate them as a developer.
