Flatpak is infinitely easier for people who don’t know what they’re doing, because it’s sandboxed and separate from the native system. If you know what you’re doing it’s different though, I don’t use them personally.
My opinion on flatpak is that it only allows developers to be loosy with dependencies. I’m convinced it will fall appart in a decade or two because it’s too messy and bloated as a technical solution.
But this one in particular vastly reduces maintenance, doesn’t do anything at all to performance, and only arguably adds complexity, I think it needs to be case by case.
Flatpak is great for two groups of users: the ones who only use default settings in standalone apps and the privacy-oriented experts who know how to tweak things to their liking.
In the middle is a large group of users who don’t know or care how things work, but they want that one feature an app is supposed to do but mysteriously doesn’t work with flatpak.
This password manager is supposed to work with my browser but it says it’s not running.
App X says it needs app Y for feature Z, but I see both app icons installed on my desktop.
I found a guide online to enable feature D, but when I paste these arcane commands into the text box thingy, it just says “.config/AppQ no such file”
Even one of these occurrences is enough to make most users give up on that app or the OS entirely. I like the idea of sandboxing apps, and I use flatpak daily, but we have to acknowledge and hopefully improve some of its limitations or many users (yourself included, it seems) will consider it unusable.
I was in agreement until you talk about flatpak…
Flatpak is infinitely easier for people who don’t know what they’re doing, because it’s sandboxed and separate from the native system. If you know what you’re doing it’s different though, I don’t use them personally.
My opinion on flatpak is that it only allows developers to be loosy with dependencies. I’m convinced it will fall appart in a decade or two because it’s too messy and bloated as a technical solution.
It’s just a weird linux distro that you install atop your distro, honestly, I have no idea why you think that.
Piling abstraction layers is bad design imo. For performances, complexity and maintenance.
But this one in particular vastly reduces maintenance, doesn’t do anything at all to performance, and only arguably adds complexity, I think it needs to be case by case.
Flatpak is great for two groups of users: the ones who only use default settings in standalone apps and the privacy-oriented experts who know how to tweak things to their liking. In the middle is a large group of users who don’t know or care how things work, but they want that one feature an app is supposed to do but mysteriously doesn’t work with flatpak.
Even one of these occurrences is enough to make most users give up on that app or the OS entirely. I like the idea of sandboxing apps, and I use flatpak daily, but we have to acknowledge and hopefully improve some of its limitations or many users (yourself included, it seems) will consider it unusable.