Flatpak is only for graphical apps - Flatpak's biggest flaw?
Flatpak is only for graphical apps - Flatpak's biggest flaw?
I love Flatpaks, the programs are nicely separated so they don't interfere with each other. They also don't have flaws like Snap's low performance or Nix's complexity.
But being limited to only graphical apps seems like a real drawback. If one wants to use Flatpaks as their primary package manager there have to be some awkward workarounds for cli programs.
E.g., the prime Flatpak experiene is supposed to be on immutable distros like Silverblue. But to install regular cli programs you are expected to spin up a distrobox (or toolbox) and install those programs there.
Having one arch distrobox where I get my cli programs from will not work, as the package entropy over time will get me the very dependency issues that Flatpak wants to solve.
So what is the solution here? Have multiple distroboxes and install packages in those in alternation and hope the boxes don't break? Use Nix alongside Flatpak? Use Snaps?
Flatpak can do CLI apps it's just mildly unwieldy because of the whole
flatpak run ....If you want reproducible dev environments, yeah you're pushed to container solutions be it distrobox, Podman or Docker. Or something like nix as a user.
If you install a Debian distrobox it'll be as reliable as Debian itself is. It's only an issue when you're after 100% reproducible systems, which Docker can help somewhat with, or again, nix. Or NixOS if you really want it all system-wide.
flatpak run org.gimp.Gimp image.pngvs.gimp image.pngor evenxdg-open image.png. "Mildly unwieldy" I suppose but a massive pain in the ass in practice. I can't believe they thought that it was a good idea to require all that and provide no way to create a script in /usr/local/bin or even .local/bin.
the package entropy over time will get me the very dependency issues that Flatpak wants to solve.
You can declare your distroboxes so that they get created regularly from scratch instead of upgrading in place: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/usage/distrobox-assemble.md
That way the entropy never hits you. Then use the Prompt terminal https://gitlab.gnome.org/chergert/prompt to make it just part of your terminal ootb.
I think Nix is great for installing CLI apps, it's not that complicated, in fact, it can make many things in your life easier.
This.
Also, @Libretto@iusearchlinux.fyi - you not be aware but you can use Nix in an imperative way (as opposed to declarative), which doesn't require learning the Nix language or editing config files etc.
Eg: say you wanted to install
tealdeer, all you need to do is run:nix profile install nixpkgs#tealdeerThere are similar one-liners to search, upgrade, rollback etc.
I use Fedora uBlue (Bazzite), and use Nix to install all my CLI apps, and Flatpak for all my GUI apps. Been running this setup for a few months on and it's been great experience (bit of a learning curve doing this way of course, but I'm pretty happy with my setup now).
I wrote a nice little CLI tool that lets you browse the flatpak store in the terminal and has an option to link all your flatpaks to their short names. Its really just a wrapper bash script that runs flatpak, but I like it because it goes from com.Blender.Blender to just "blender" and it works on the command line.
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Cool, where can we find it?
You mean I can stop filling up my .local/bin with bash scripts that just run the flatpak?
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The point is that you can not find most cli programs on Flathub, de facto making Flatpaks unsuitable for cli programs. Snapcraft on the other hand hosts neofetch, dust, youtube-dl etc.
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I'd agree with you
If I could actually find cli app in there
There is a neovim flatpak, which is not a CLI app but a TUI one, but I guess this counts.
And there is also jellyfin-server
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Worth mentioning that one can use bubblewrap directly over chroot to get similar behaviour as well.
It’s often simpler to use distrobox but being able to rsync chroot a between devices can be very convenient.
If we are talking Silverblue then podman is your pick for everything Flatpack "can't"
there is no big push for cli flatpack since this already a solved cause with containers for podman/docker/kuberneteshowever no matter how you approach this you will always have dependency security issues
unless you built every flatpack/container yourself you are at the whim of the creator of it to keep every dependecy updated
this is already a known vulnerability factor in the container sphere on topbl of the threat of 0-day exploitsI'm sure you know what you're talking about. But your comment becomes a techno babble word salad when you throw in a typo or two, skip essential words and forego practically all correct use of punctuation and capitalization. I know this makes me sound old, dumb, and maybe a little mean. I know I'm old and dumb, but I'm really trying to not be mean.
Can one tool be used for multiple use cases? Sure. Should it? Maybe not.
VPN apps don't seem to work with it and Proton said their Drive app won't either. So for whatever reasons those might be.
Try fleek. I use it on my fedora system and it integrates really well.
Would Homebrew work for this? I use it in WSL for all my CLI programs.
Flatpaks are disk and memory hogs, and they start slowly. That's because they're like little selt-contained full-fledged operating systems.
Flatpaks, like snaps, applimages, dockers, Electron apps, React apps or Flutter apps are the lazy 21st century developer's way of achieving cross-compatibility without any effort.
I always like comments like this that don't offer the "real" solution
That is not true. Unless you run some electron app, which is like a browser, instead of making PWA, doing same thing. AppImages are dead. And Docker/Podman could be lazy developers, but you are still free to find an alternative?
That's not true and misleading. Docker and flatpak base images mostly contain shared libraries and even these get automatically deduplicated. Your flatpak calculator doesn't ship systemd or any other init system nor does it ship system drivers lol
And yeah if you are working in a restrained env and care about those few mbs taken by shared libraries then containarization is not for you.
Containerization is not perfect and it will never be, but that was never the goal. Making apps and services independent of the base system and easily restrictable like mounting volumes, restricting network, etc.. was.
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I didn't say they were the same thing. I said they're what people do today to avoid having to port their code to different platforms and manage shared library versions, performances be damned.