Also each is pretty bad in terms of usability and practicality, either losing integration because “containerized” or taking GBs of space or both.
Edit: guys relax, I’m not a linux hater, I use it daily. But windows does have a unified environment, which makes deployment so much easier, while linux doesn’t. And that’s a problem since you either have old broken apps on distro repositories, or impractical, potebtially bloated, and even more fractionated environments like those I mentioned. They are patches and we should work towards a more standard environment, not adding more and more levels of abstraction like electron does.
AppImages can get quite large because each app is self-contained, but the “losing integration” part is nonsense these days for any of these formars. That’s why we have portals, and if those aren’t enough you can still give the app full permissions.
Appimages are usually quite reasonable in size, it’s Flatpak that usually require 2/3 GB per app since every package has its own version of KDE/Gnome or other runtimes so every app still has to download a new one.
That’s simply not true, if the required dependencies are already downloaded they get used by every Flatpak app. If you have three apps requiring the Gnome 46 libs those only exist once.
I don’t know where this myth about Flatpaks always being gigabytes in size originates from or why it’s so persistent, but it’s wrong.
I don’t know where this myth about Flatpaks always being gigabytes in size originates from or why it’s so persistent, but it’s wrong.
Alright, here is ~25 GUI apps flatpak vs appimage:
6 GiB flatpak.
2.7 GIB appimage.
This is if you have a filesystem with transparent compression, If you do not have such filesystem (ext4), then it is more like 15 GIB vs 2.9 GiB lol.
This comparison is missing the flatpak equivalents of kdeconnect, deadbeef and a few CLI tools that I have on right btw, flatpak-dedup-checker for some reason doesn’t check the /var/lib/flatpak/repo directory which is usually another +1GiB in best case scenario.
In my experience the issue is different flatpaks depending on different versions of gnome platform or mesa or whatever, so you have multiple versions of the same library.
I have plenty of storage though so I don’t care that much.
I’m saying I’ve almost never downloaded a Flatpak that didn’t require a new dependency downloaded.
When I removed all my flatpk some time ago, I had: Steam, Viking, Discord, FreeCad and Flatseal to manage them. All of them and their dependencies used something arounx 17 GB of disk space (most of which was of course several versions of dependency runtimes), and that was after I removed all the unused runtimes that forn some reason it doesn’t remove after I uninstall or they are upgraded.
I’m sure if I installed more Flatpaks, some dependencies would eventually be reused, but you still need a good collection of them at any given time. So in pracrice you still need a lot lf space unfortunately.
Bollocks. I’ve seen that many times with Flatpak (can’t speak for Snap), and every single time it was either because the packager failed to set up permissions or because the user messed with permissions that the application needed. Break off the tip of a screwdriver and it will no longer function as a screwdriver.
And I know you’re talking out of your ass because AppImage isn’t even sandboxed.
taking GBs of space
That part is true and accurate, and for a very good reason: dependency pinning. System packages can break if they don’t have the correct versions of shared libraries. If a package requires a very old version of a library, and doesn’t link it statically or supply it with the package, it can misbehave, have missing features, or refuse to even start. Flatpak (and probably Snap too, can’t speak for it) solves that by letting the packager specify (pin) the exact version of a dependency. If five separate packages require five different versions of the GNOME application framework, then they will download five separate packages of the correct version. AppImage solves it by being monolithic: everything is packaged together into a single executable.
Bollocks. I’ve seen that many times with Flatpak (can’t speak for Snap), and every single time it was either because the packager failed to set up permissions or because the user messed with permissions that the application needed. Break off the tip of a screwdriver and it will no longer function as a screwdriver.
Well then I guess you haven’t tried to get a password manager like KeepassXC to work with a Flatpak browser, because none of the solutions I’ve seen are “fix the permissions”.
I don’t know if it’s still the case, but up to a couple of years ago, Flatpak was configured so that externally mounted folders were not accessible. I discovered that when Steam on flatpak refused to install games on my hdd, and it was quite frustrating to figure out how to enable it. Still, it’s difficult to criticize how “bloated” are electron apps (they are) when I need to download 2GB or runtime for an 80MB telegram binary
Snaps integration is even worse as I’ve seen browser extensions state they straight don’t work on snap’s browsers. Also desktop integration on gnone (even files drag and drop between snaps) are broken on the ubuntu installations I tried.
Appimages have the least drawbacks and are my preferred methods between the three (at least they take less storage space than an equivalent Flarpak for some reason, but are still broken sometimes), yet they still miss a central package repository, and that’s a big problem.
Also each is pretty bad in terms of usability and practicality, either losing integration because “containerized” or taking GBs of space or both.
Edit: guys relax, I’m not a linux hater, I use it daily. But windows does have a unified environment, which makes deployment so much easier, while linux doesn’t. And that’s a problem since you either have old broken apps on distro repositories, or impractical, potebtially bloated, and even more fractionated environments like those I mentioned. They are patches and we should work towards a more standard environment, not adding more and more levels of abstraction like electron does.
Even Torvalds says it so.
AppImages can get quite large because each app is self-contained, but the “losing integration” part is nonsense these days for any of these formars. That’s why we have portals, and if those aren’t enough you can still give the app full permissions.
Appimages are usually quite reasonable in size, it’s Flatpak that usually require 2/3 GB per app since every package has its own version of KDE/Gnome or other runtimes so every app still has to download a new one.
That’s simply not true, if the required dependencies are already downloaded they get used by every Flatpak app. If you have three apps requiring the Gnome 46 libs those only exist once.
I don’t know where this myth about Flatpaks always being gigabytes in size originates from or why it’s so persistent, but it’s wrong.
Alright, here is ~25 GUI apps flatpak vs appimage:
This is if you have a filesystem with transparent compression, If you do not have such filesystem (ext4), then it is more like 15 GIB vs 2.9 GiB lol.
This comparison is missing the flatpak equivalents of kdeconnect, deadbeef and a few CLI tools that I have on right btw,
flatpak-dedup-checkerfor some reason doesn’t check the/var/lib/flatpak/repodirectory which is usually another +1GiB in best case scenario.In my experience the issue is different flatpaks depending on different versions of gnome platform or mesa or whatever, so you have multiple versions of the same library.
I have plenty of storage though so I don’t care that much.
I’m not saying that’s not true.
I’m saying I’ve almost never downloaded a Flatpak that didn’t require a new dependency downloaded.
When I removed all my flatpk some time ago, I had: Steam, Viking, Discord, FreeCad and Flatseal to manage them. All of them and their dependencies used something arounx 17 GB of disk space (most of which was of course several versions of dependency runtimes), and that was after I removed all the unused runtimes that forn some reason it doesn’t remove after I uninstall or they are upgraded.
I’m sure if I installed more Flatpaks, some dependencies would eventually be reused, but you still need a good collection of them at any given time. So in pracrice you still need a lot lf space unfortunately.
Bollocks. I’ve seen that many times with Flatpak (can’t speak for Snap), and every single time it was either because the packager failed to set up permissions or because the user messed with permissions that the application needed. Break off the tip of a screwdriver and it will no longer function as a screwdriver.
And I know you’re talking out of your ass because AppImage isn’t even sandboxed.
That part is true and accurate, and for a very good reason: dependency pinning. System packages can break if they don’t have the correct versions of shared libraries. If a package requires a very old version of a library, and doesn’t link it statically or supply it with the package, it can misbehave, have missing features, or refuse to even start. Flatpak (and probably Snap too, can’t speak for it) solves that by letting the packager specify (pin) the exact version of a dependency. If five separate packages require five different versions of the GNOME application framework, then they will download five separate packages of the correct version. AppImage solves it by being monolithic: everything is packaged together into a single executable.
Well then I guess you haven’t tried to get a password manager like KeepassXC to work with a Flatpak browser, because none of the solutions I’ve seen are “fix the permissions”.
From what I’ve read it seems you shouldn’t run a browser as a flatpak anyway, as this somehow weakens the built-in isolation.
I think I originally read about this somewhere librewolf-related but can’t seem to find it now.
I did find this similar discussion: https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/correct-way-to-install-browsers-on-linux-securely/27046/6
I don’t know if it’s still the case, but up to a couple of years ago, Flatpak was configured so that externally mounted folders were not accessible. I discovered that when Steam on flatpak refused to install games on my hdd, and it was quite frustrating to figure out how to enable it. Still, it’s difficult to criticize how “bloated” are electron apps (they are) when I need to download 2GB or runtime for an 80MB telegram binary
Snaps integration is even worse as I’ve seen browser extensions state they straight don’t work on snap’s browsers. Also desktop integration on gnone (even files drag and drop between snaps) are broken on the ubuntu installations I tried.
Appimages have the least drawbacks and are my preferred methods between the three (at least they take less storage space than an equivalent Flarpak for some reason, but are still broken sometimes), yet they still miss a central package repository, and that’s a big problem.
I like having options
Flatpak is good. I say that as both a user of them and a dev of applications that are published as flatpaks.