Flatpak be like...

- Dependency hell every day
  Damn near 25 year Linux user here, servers, desktops, everything. I haven't seen a single dependency issue in over 5 years.
  
  Quick question can you suggest some lotto numbers thx
  
  I get what you mean, but the way you worded it makes it seem like you experienced dependency hell for 20 out of 25 years...
  
  ffmpeg was like three weeks ago
  
  ಠ_ಠ
  
  So lucky ones do exist after all
  
  I mean luckily distro maintainers usually deal with it (quite a lot of work) but have any additional repos and it gets wonky if those are not in total lockstep.
  
  In over 5 years? Like when containers and flatpaks became popular and include all their dependencies? Or when RHEL8 introduced app streams to help combat dependency issues?
  
  Yeah, to be honest, they're less and less common, especially with rolling release distros.
  
  I just had one yesterday trying to get Mobile Verification Tookit going on my laptop. I mean I just had to manually find it and install it but it was still a very minor issue.
- But Flatpak packages don't contain the Runtime dependencies. Those are shared among all Flatpak packages. AppImage bundles everything.
- I get what you mean, especially regarding stuff like Python 2 vs 3 and the like. In that case it’s mostly an upstream issue. The Python devs disregarded this very important aspect and we’re stuck bearing with it.
  Excepting those problem children, dependency hell is a solved problem. When people complain about it today I assume they either:
  Are struggling with badly designed backwards/multi version compatibility of a specific library; OR
  Never went through actual dependency hell, be it either early 00s Linux package managers or Windows DLLs. Then they see an easily solvable package conflict and think that is dependency hell.

4GB of dependencies shared across loads of apps
The horror... That's almost 0,4% of my drive!
- Its good if all many apps use them. But the problem is when you have to install one 10mb app and it pulls 4gb deps.
  Also i don't know what is flapak runtimes which are big and different versions of them are required for different apps
  
  Indeed, for a single app it might be a lot, considering it's a single app. But even then it's not a lot of disk space out of what people have. But with every additional app, that additional space use lessens thanks to shared runtimes and dedupping.
  Also i don't know what is flapak runtimes which are big and different versions of them are required for different apps
  I think a few of the most used one cover most apps, but even with different runtime versions and I think even different runtimes, thanks to dedupping it should only use extra space for stuff that's actually different between the two. Two instances of the same library in different runtimes would only use the space of one, afaik.
  
  Well, at least with FlatPak the dependencies are likely shared, if applications are in the same ballpark.
  Contrast with docker style where everything bundles their own dependencies so even if you have identical containers, you have essentially duplicate content wasting space.

4Gb of dependencies so far

I use Flatpaks mostly because I like having my base os and gui minimal as possible. Every thinking that is not core os I install as a flatpak. This is great because I didn't have to install dependencies like lib32 and other libraries on my root partition. Lean and mean.
- But doesnt each flatpak is packed with its own dependencies? So bascially you have the same dependency over and over.
  
  No, each runtime is only used once. You only get duplicates for apps that use different runtimes or for dependencies that are bundled in the app.
  
  You may be thinking of AppImage. That's one file that contains everything.

Yeah storage is cheap but I last reformated my boot drive in 2017 so my root partition is 20GB and now I have no room for Flatpak. Now I could just resize it but wheres the fun in that.
TL:DR "A 20GB root partition ought to be enough for anybody."
- You can have flatpak install it's stuff into your home with the --user flag.
- I feel your pain. Flatpack can really ruin partitioning strategies.
  
  It has an installations feature to use any location, as well as users home by default.
- I seriously want to switch some of the small distros like tinycore as a daily driver.
  1GB of RAM and 4GB disk space is more than enough for all but the most bloated apps.
  
  I've put steam on a librebooted chromebook with similar stats, it has to install games on a usb drive/sd card but it works quite well even for casual linux gamers
- i just gave up on that and have everything i can on one partition
  
  Volumes FTW!
- I was starting an install of Debian the other day, and it suggested 25 GB as the root partition (including /usr, but not /var, /home, or /tmp). I had to laugh. My server has a 50 GB partition for that purpose and it's around half full.
  I aborted the installation. Might try again later today. (Switching this machine from Kubuntu, using a new drive, so it's not critical that it be done at a certain time.)
  
  Depends on what you run on the server. A lot of the VMs I use for https://dnstools.ws/ have 5GB space and they use less than 2GB of it. They don't have much installed though.
  
  Format with btrfs if you use flatpack, it has deduplication.

I use flatpaks on my desktop all the time, no issue with storage space. But my laptop with only 128gb SSD starts sweating.
- I that half of what my cell phone has
  
  Not everyone has top notch tech, or the money to afford it. 128GB for a phone is more than enough storage space, so if the price of the 256GB model is 30 or $40 plus, I'd opt for the 128GB model as well.

Flatpak don't be like this at all.
- I suppose it might seem like that if you install it just for a singular app. Then the runtime + possible drivers are a hefty load. But everything after that, the weight of the deps proportional to the apps gets lighter through shared runtimes, drivers, dedupping and so on.
  Some go to install a singular flatpak and are horrified by the amount it tries to install and never look back. Which I sorta get, though if that their level of familiarity with flatpak they might not be the best people to partake in the dep/flatpak/snap/appimage fights. But they still do.
  
  Yes, the same can be said if you run GNOME and install a single KDE app or vice-versa. And here’s my petition to convert DigiKam to FLTK so everyone can enjoy it.

I used it after getting frustrated with the AUR. Never looked back unless the package wasn't on Flatpak or had an AppImage.
- AUR is for esoteric shit, what were you trying to get on there that had a flatpak lol
  
  For me, things like a Tidal music player, and proton-ge. Both can be found in flatpaks
  
  You say that but there are people who swear by the AUR for everything because it has everything or they prefer Pacman for everything lol
  
  I've had about 15% success rate with my attempts at AUR. I don't have the patience to figure out why things don't work, I guess. Either ended up with a flatpak, or decided it wasn't that important to me.

I found a QT app today. Uncompiled file size: 1 MB. Compiled size: 100 MB
- Yeah, completely normal for Qt... well, if you bundle everything that is. If it depends on shared libraries, should't be larger than 10MB or so.
  
  Also this app had an entire instance of WebKit compiled in it

Flatpak is crazy inefficient, but at least I can get software that is not yet on distro repos. It will get better.
- Yeah, I'm still not sure which is better flats or images? I still try to find .debs or apt get stuff.
- I usually repack in cases like this (not in repos). It's fairly easy in Arch and Void (haven't tried Portage in Gentoo yet).

those are shared tho, no biggie

I haven't had any real issues with Flatpaks outside of them not following my GTK theme which I fixed with Flatseal.

When you've got decent Internet and storage is cheap....

I just use appimages, they are even smaller than native packages many times due to their compression, for example libreoffice being 300 vs 600 MiB, librewolf 110 vs 330 MiB, etc.

flatpak is about permission:
https://github.com/tchx84/Flatseal
the fact that gtk, qt, firefox pull in a hundred deps is their own problem.
not a problem per se..
ask software to install itself twice and it becomes noticable how enormous the code is.

Agree 😂😂😂

Yall gonna lose your shit when you find out how many crumbling dependencies are used to maintain your years-old "native" lackages