So a few popular Linux distros decided to drop a few major packages like how red hat dropped rpm packages for libreoffice in favor for the flatpak packages.
If more distros decided to drop more packages from their main repository in favor for flatpak packages, then are there any obvious concerns? From my personal experience, flatpaks didn’t work well for me. If flatpaks become mainstream and takeover the linux distros, then I might just move to Freebsd. I just want to know if there is any positives to moving away from official repositories to universal repositories.
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It’s the midpoint before we ascend to enlightenment with NixOS
I’m a software engineer, but when it comes to configuring and managing my OS I think I have more in common with the average user than a power user. I just want to install programs and I want them to work.
The other day I wanted to install valgrind. Should be easy, right? I’m on the latest LTS version of Xubuntu. That should be the easiest thing in the world, just sudo apt install valgrind. Lo and behold, apparently I’m in an unresolvable dependency hell.
But turns out there’s a snap version of valgrind. Worked fine!
So what am I supposed to think? People bitch about snap, even here, but it works every time for me. Flatpak is the same thing to a guy like me.
Same for me, snaps work everytime, flatpacks rarely do.
Firefox would like a word….
Forced snap+Firefox is hell
Linux is Linux - Nah… there will be distros like Arch where you can just use the AUR (someone started a project to bring AUR like functionality to other distros), and there will be distros that go mostly or all in on other packaging methods. There’s also wrappers like topgrade for those of us that don’t want to bother with multiple commands to update all.
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I’m liking them especially for long complile-time binaries that are otherwise difficult to keep up to date.
I recently installed Manjaro, and tried to install VSC.
In the official repos there is only a free version called Code with which the synchronization failed, and I could not synchronize my settings and plugins. I tried with the Flatpak version and although the synchronization was working, the interface was inconsistent and using zsh from my distribution and not bash in the integrated terminal was complex. Then I gave up when I saw that I could not get a Git-flow plugin to work because although I had it installed, VSC did not see it.
Install the Snap version, the interface is consistent and 0 problems.
So I think it’s not a bad thing to gradually move towards more contained apps like snap or flatpak, but there is still a lot of work to be done to make them fit all needs.
Have you checked the github page? It lists solutions for (some of?) your issues: https://github.com/flathub/com.visualstudio.code#usage
But I agree with you, flatpak needs a lot of work. In saying that though, I’d never touch Snap - that just brings in a whole host of other issues. I’d rather just use the official tarball or install the official .deb/.rpm into a container.
Yes, I looked for the zsh problem and found the solution, I also looked for the git-flow problem. But this one seemed more complex to solve with the solutions I found, and I had no more time. So I opted for the quick option which was to install the snap version and everything flowed smoothly until today.
