• 3 Posts
  • 36 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: August 31st, 2023

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  • well, the point of flatpak is to have bundled dependencies so they run predictably no matter the distro

    if one of your software’s dependency gets updated, and your software isn’t, you may run into issues - like a function from the library you’re using getting removed, or its behaviour changing slightly. and some distros may also apply patches to some of their library that breaks stuff too!
    often, with complex libraries, even when you check the version number, you may have behavioural differences between distros depending on the compile flags used (i.e. some features being disabled, etc.)
    so, while in theory portable builds work, for them to be practical, they most often are statically linked (all the dependencies get built into the executable - no relying on system libraries). and that comes with a huge size penalty, even when compared to flatpaks, as those do have some shared dependencies between flatpaks! you can for example request to depend on a specific version of the freedesktop SDK, which will provide you with a bunch of standard linux tools, and that’ll only get installed once for every package you have that uses it











  • AppImages can be double clicked and executed. They are not a pain to use.

    i can understand that, but flatpaks are easier to upgrade and automatically integrated into your package manager, which (i believe) isn’t as straight forward for appimages. also there’s one major repo where you can find most apps (flathub) making app-hunting less daunting i feel like.
    also, once your app is installed, it’s always in your system menu, so that doesn’t change much in the long run

    Comfortable setup that carried over from Ubuntu LTS.

    can’t you carry over flatpaks as well? you can probably copy /var/lib/flatpak or wherever they store their stuff from one system to another, or failing that, save all the app IDs you have installed, and re-install them onto your new system, backing up ~/.var to keep all your data!