i avoided flatpacks before.
but now that i tried out silverblue and had to rely heavily on them,
i have to admit that flatpacks are not nearly as bad as i thought.
the only issues i encountered are with steam (might not start propperly on first launch)
and with ides(terminal starts inside the sandbox)
other than that it works great.
I was using Flatpak and Toolbx exclusively until I discovered Nix. It's much better than using those two.
Flatpak and Snap definitely make installation more simple. The packages come with their own dependencies so you have way less issues with conflicting dependencies. I like them when they are officially supported by the distribution or developer, but I prefer the official installations over supporting a random person making a package (not sure if this is a thing with Flatpak, but with Snaps that was definitely a thing).
Some software really benefits from not begin inside flatpak though, I had to switch back to the deb version of Visual Studio Code as the integrated console didn't have access to some software outside the package and was also logging weird errors.
I'd rather have 5GB of binaries than deal with unmet dependencies one more time (despite many people claims, it is still easy to fall into), my only criticism for flatpak though, is that any kind of modification for a file requires you to navigate through at least ten directories.
Or subtle breakage, because the dependencies from the distro doesn't quite match what the application needs
Directories are probably the most offensive thing about all package management. Developers are happy to throw their files in .hidden directories anywhere they please. No real standards for that.
I don't know what principles people are adhering to when it comes to the ideal computing environment, but having to deal with the minutia of installation problems to meet some kind of criteria is just not interesting to me either.
I prefered AppImages, but now that I'm on Nix, I've gone back to native. Native packages work well in the NixOS ecosystem.
For sure certain package managers are better than others, and NIX seems to be in a class of its own.
I don't know how much time I am willing to invest in NIX, or Guix for that scheme power, but I can do myself a favor experiment with a few VMs.
I try to always use flatpak because I can install/remove software is a simpler way without leaving dependencies installed on my system forever.
Obviously for critical stuff I use the native version
Definitely not me. I am on LiveUSB right now which makes my disk volume limited. And native packaging satisfies my needs (even when packages are old)
In place of snap OF COURSE.
I can state without any doubt that i had problems with 80% of the programs coming from snap..
For me the perfect example is GNOME Builder (I use KDE Plasma) but this package has it all. No, you dont need to download any dependencies, the sandbox handles it all!
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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