• Leaflet@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Depends what you mean by “problem”. The biggest problem with traditional packages like debs and rpms is that compatibility sucks. They only reliably run on the distro and version they are designed for. Third party packages typically build on old dependencies and hope that backwards compatibility will allow them to run without issue on later distro versions.

    Yes, it’s redundant to have have the same app packaged as flatpaks. Though I don’t think that redundancy is necessarily a bad thing. Flathub is not a profitable project and has up to this point relied on Gnome for funding. There’s work being done to spin it out to be it’s own thing and hopefully be supported by paid apps. But what if that fails and it shuts down? Or less dramatically, what if Flathub has a major outage?

    One of the common complaints against snap is that there is only one store, controlled by Canonical. Flatpak is designed to support multiple stores. I don’t see why they can’t exist side by side. That’s exactly what I do. I have dozens of apps installed from each source.

    And to address the claim of what if “each distro decides to make a flatpak repo according to their own philosophies?”. I guess that would depend on how many resources are being poured into supporting that. If flatpak continues to push for OCI support, then that would make it easier for distros to have their own remotes, if they desire. If not, they can just use an existing option. Whether that be Flathub or Fedora. Personally, I think Fedora Flatpaks are a good match for Debian and OpenSUSE’s policies, only real downside is that major Gnome app updates would be a month delayed, annoying Tumbleweed users.

    • beleza pura@lemmy.eco.br
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      1 day ago

      i don’t have an issue with multiple flatpak repos. i’d actually find it very interesting if we went a more decentralized route with flatpak (maybe kde, gnome, mozzila would each have their own repos). but i don’t see the point of a distro-specific flatpak when we already have normal packages. compatibility is kind of a non-issue, since you’re not supposed to install them elsewhere anyway (unlike flatpaks)

      also, i see absolutely no reason to use fedora’s flatpak repo on debian given that flathub exists already. you could add it if you want it, but what’s the point?

      • Leaflet@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Fedora and Debian have similar philosophies. FOSS only, packages must be built from source, no vendored dependencies. So they have similar policies regarding security and Fedora Flatpaks align closer to that than Flathub.

        I believe Debian also doesn’t ship patented codecs in their main repo.

        • beleza pura@lemmy.eco.br
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          1 day ago

          that makes a little more sense, though debian is not as strict as fedora about propietary software (it is in the separate nonfree section, but that’s it)

          • Leaflet@lemmy.world
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            22 hours ago

            I don’t think nonfree is enabled by default. Though I guess the repos are still hosted by debian, unlike RPMFusion. Though Fedora does treat it as semi-official given that parts of it can be enabled during first setup.