The tone here is surprisingly negative. Personally I’m happy with the efforts of the Flathub team 🤷
As a newer Linux user I really like flatpaks.
I don’t use them for most things I install but proprietary apps I want sandboxed or programs that have weird issues with dependencies I grab the flatpak.
Lemmy (and phoronix) people are generally extremely repelled by new stuff in the Linux world
Lemmy people are generally extremely repulsive.
Agreed, flatpaks are great for desktop apps. I use Nix for the majority of my packages, but I use flatpak for proprietary for the sandboxing.
To everyone saying you can’t mirror a flatpak repo… you’re absolutely right. There should be a far easier way to set up your own mirror without needing to build everything from scratch. That being said, if you wanted to try to make your own repo with every one of flathub’s apps, here you go:
https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/hosting-a-repository.html
Edit: Some did get a flathub mirror working. The issue is that a. Fastly works good enough and b. There is no concept of “packages” on the server side. It’s just one big addressed content store because of ostree, and syncing is apparently difficult? Idk, not being able to sync the state of content is like the entire point of ostree…
I’d prefer to see downloads per country per capita.
I’m gonna be honest I’ve never had a flatpak version of something ever work properly.
There was even one popular media player that only came in flatpak form or otherwise build from source.
So obviously, for no reason at all, it barely functioned compared to other applications I had already tried.
Congrats to you people put there somehow running things like Steam with no problems lmao.
I have like 20 flatpak software products running without any problem for 2 years now.
Your system might be messed up
Does that count for when an OS is wiped and reinstalled or a nerd has like 3 computers and keeps OS flipping?
In that case you should use user-install flatpaks and separating and reusing your /home partition
I’m sorry
Awesome! Love it!
Still no proper way to mirror the thing and have it working offline / on internal networks. Great job self-hosters and sovereign citizens ;)
Offline/internal network installs can be handled with
flatpak create-usb- https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/usb-drives.htmlOne can distribute flatpaks along with their dependencies on USB drives (or network shares, etc.) which is especially helpful in situations where Internet access is limited or non-existent.
Cache/mirroring would be great for those who need it.
Edit:
Thinking about it, I wonder if there’s enough “core features” with ‘create-usb’ that its just matter of scripting something together to intercept requests, auto-create-usb what’s being requested and then serve the package locally? If a whole mirror is required, it may be possible to iterate over all flathub packages and ‘create-usb’ the entire repo to have a local cache/mirror? Just thinking “out loud”.
Thinking about it, I wonder if there’s enough “core features” with ‘create-usb’ that its just matter of scripting something together to intercept requests, auto-create-usb what’s being requested and then serve the package locally?
The issue is that… there aren’t enough “core features”. It doesn’t even handle different architectures and their dependencies correctly. It wasn’t made to be mirrored, nor decentralized.
Apt for instance was designed in a much better way, it becomes trivial to mirror the entire thing or parts and for the end tool it doesn’t even matter if the source is a server on the internet, a local machine, a flash drive or a local folder, all work the same.
Flatpaks are not centralized, Flathub is. You can have your own repo.
Yeah sure, just try to mirror Flathub into your repo.
I don’t get it. Why would you store all of it? I mean, you can but… why?
Because…
- Universities might want to locally host a mirror in order to waste less bandwidth and provide faster downloads;
- Large companies usually like to host internal mirrors for the same reasons as above and also so they can audit and pick what packages will be available for their end users;
- Flathub is slow af for some people;
- Local country-specific mirrors are always faster;
- In some countries not everyone can access the official flathub;
- One might be dealing with airgapped networks and systems for sensitive work and you want to have ways for your end users to install flatpaks;
- Fastly, their CDN might go down at any point (like Cloudflare sometimes does) and you’ll end up with nothing;
- Flathub itself may be subject to a cyberattack and their service might get crippled for a days or weeks and you’ll have nothing as well;
For what’s worth Debian archive repositories are about 5 TB and people actively mirror then in universities, companies, cloud providers etc.
The question here isn’t “why would you” but rather “why would I be unable to do it”. Their actively gatekeeping their repository in a futile attempt to be the single and central point of flatpak distribution - much like what Apple does with the App Store.
What’s the issue? I installed mint because I know fuckall about Linux, and tbh it’s a dice toss if I have used the Flatpak option not knowing what the actual difference between them are
Honestly, you don’t have to worry about what others say, you should use what works best for you. Personally I find them to be nice and comfortable to use, myself 😅
Thing is, if your flatpak software needs something not in its container, it gets a little complicated, because first you have to realise what exactly the problem is and secondly you have to use something like flatseal to give it access to wathever it needs to work (no real help there)
So this was what took me back to pacman (or better said yay)
i hope it does 20 billion
nice
Brazil has so many downloads
MVP
It is noteworthy that builds of Chrome, VLC, Dolphin, Steam and Spotify are created by third-party enthusiasts not associated with the main projects.
What great news, that’s why there is no trust in Flathub.
Why don’t you open an feature request on their git if you have an issue with volunteer work.
It’s funny thinking this guy uses a distro package manager potentially with unofficial patches applied to the package.
I mean it is still miles ahead of snaps and the snap store
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Do you maybe mean snap?
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Could you elaborate?
Narrator: “But no, they could not elaborate.”
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Or maybe the two countries with a larger population than the United States have significantly lower per capita income and so fewer people own desktop/laptop computers. Most of the world probably has, at most, a smartphone.
If anything, Brazil seems like the outlier on the that map. You’d expect the U.S. to have the most computers. But Brazil and China are roughly similar in terms of income.
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China blocked Flathub
