Appimages totally suck, because many developers think they were a real packaging format and support them exclusively.
Their use case is tiny, and in 99% of cases Flatpak is just better.
I could not find a single post or article about all the problems they have, so I wrote this.
This is not about shaming open source contributors. But Appimages are obviously broken, pretty badly maintained, while organizations/companies like Balena, Nextcloud etc. don’t seem to get that.
Flatpak is the best solution.
Password manager is usualy an add on.
Themes not applying is wrong packaging, not flatpaks fault.
Flatpaks limitations are real but you should install as flatpak first and if not working, then use the native package or nix. And limitations in flatpaks should be advertised.
Hehe, No. It’s the sandboxing.
But with this approach you take over the answering questions to newbies… Why doesn’t the webcam show up in the videoconferencing? Why doesn’t my GTK / QT themes apply to some software and it’s a 2 page tutorial with lots of command line commands to fix that? Why can’t I install Firefox add-ons and on Windows and MacOS everything just works? Why is Linux so complicated and regularly stuff doesn’t work?
I had this argument multiple times now. There is an easy solution: Do it the other way around until you know what you’re doing and about the consequences. Distributions are there for a reason. They put everything into one package and do testing to make sure everything works together. They provide you with security patches if you choose the right distro. LibreOffice and a Browser even come preinstalled most of the times. If you do away with all of that, it’s now your job to tie the software into your desktop, your job to handle the sandboxing if there is addons that need to pierce the sandbox. Your job to make sure the Flatpak publishers do quick updates and keep the runtimes up-to-date if a security vulnerability arise within an used library…
I’m not directly opposed to using Flatpak. I’m just saying there are some consequences that aren’t that obvious. In my experience hyping some of the newer technologies without simultaneously explaining the consequences is regularly doing a disservice to new users.
Do you mean fedora not installing codecs by default and the flatpak version of firefox has it bundled, i.e. just works?
I don’t want to argument with you about that. If something doesn’t work as expected or intended, you’ve done a bad job. Stuff not working on linux isn’t exclusive to flatpak. It’s the fault of maintainers if people complain about a flatpak version compared to distro package.
More people have to use flatpak and report the bugs they experience. The more people focus on flstpak the less infancy bugs will appear.
I’ve got only recent runtimes installed. There’s no old runtime. I understand your concern though, but it’s less of a problem for maintained software. Moreover, you’ve got the same problrm for other package manager. Flatpakcan even improve upon this because it’s bundled.
There’s also a distinction to be made if it’s an official distribution channel or if someone else packaged it.