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What are your thoughts on Flatpak/Flathub?
(flathub.org)
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this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
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I still prefer traditional packages, but I get why devs of complicated graphical apps with lots of dependencies hate them. As for Flatpak specifically, I'm not super impressed. It's just going to get more annoying over time having more old versions of all their libraries and more and more apps that aren't updating to the latest version so they eat up a ton of drive space and give constant notices to harass the devs, but out of all the major distro agnostic options they suck the least and they're getting better the fastest, which is why I think they've pretty much won at this point. I'm not currently using them, but it's pretty much inevitable that I'll have to at some point, and overall that's probably more good than bad. I think AppImages could have been better if the lead dev wasn't a walking, talking collection of weird hills to die on, but I'm afraid that ship has already sailed.
I mean if the apps are not maintained, they wouldnt work well as distro packages too, would they?
Not really. It's actually pretty common for simpler, unmaintained apps to get small changes in each distro made by the distro maintainers to stay compatible with their current library versions. There's nobody doing that on Flathub.
Probably, but I guess thats the lack of "it has to be updated". Just as distro maintainers do, flatpak maintainers or contributors can do as well, as its often pretty easy.
Sure, they can, and yeah it is pretty easy, but people have lives. They move on. A distro always has someone checking to make sure things aren't broken. On Flathub it won't even break. It'll just waste drive space and start giving users annoying error messages, and there if the maintainer isn't interested in maintaining it anymore the only option for doing anything about it is to fork the whole project, and who's going to do that for something that isn't even really broken?
you dont need to fork a project to update its manifest on github flathub. I think the packaging is very easy and accessible, in comparison to maintaining some Debian repo package etc. Also there are way more officially supported apps on Flathub, so I dont think the lack of pressure to upgrade an app is such a big problem.
But for sure, Onionshare was one of them, and different parts of the community took care of it.
How exactly do you update the github of a flathub package with no one actively maintaining it? Not sarcastic. That is an actual question.
And I'm not worried about big officially supported apps. A better example of the kind of thing I'm talking about is older open source games. Flatpak could be great for games. No distro out there is maintaining a current version of every open source game that has ever been released, but Flathub can, and it could be great. Unfortunately anything that's not being actively maintained is rapidly going to become a 200MB download that whines about security every time you update your flatpaks, even if it doesn't connect to the internet at all. Even if it's possible for any random person to update it, who will?
Of course, this doesn't just have to be about games. There are lots of open source programs out there that just kind of get completed and abandoned. And that's not even bringing up all the closed source software on flathub that definitely won't be updated eventually. These aren't unsolvable problems, of course, but I don't even think anybody working on flatpak even cares.
I dont know who manages "who can maintain", if its only a single person thats bad of course. Good point that should be addressed to the flathub people. There should always be administrative access to some form of elected bunch of people that can then merge PRs or make new people admins.
True about the EOL runtime error messages, I mean they are important but should be possible to mute per app, especially when its offline. This will then just consume more disk space, which is probably fine.