Flatpak on Linux

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Flatpak is a package maintainer, probably just for Linux but don't take my word for that, I don't know.

I have only just, finally, given a look at Flatpak as a way of installing and maintaining heavyweight applications.

As far as I can tell, you still need a distribution installed on your hardware. It still needs one of the windowing solutions - traditionally X11, these days perhaps Wayland. And you still need to have a GUI installed on top of that. I don't think any of those components can be held in a Flatpak.

The distribution maintains a host of libraries to which user programs have access. It means that user programs have to be compiled against those libraries. Either the user does that himself or the distribution managers maintain a repository of pre-compiled programs which the user can selectively install from.

Flatpak, by contrast, bundles major applications with all the required library components into a single unit. The library versions are selected by the Flatpak maintainer, not the distribution maintainer, and the Flatpak can be installed onto any distribution. That's a one-time recompile between versions for all users. The cost is that the installed Flatpak size on the user's disk is typically perhaps five time larger than the conventional distribution install because no libraries are shared between applications, they exist in many copies on the same disk, some of which will be different version releases.

If you have a modern drive measuring in Terrabytes then the odd 100 Gigabytes of overspill libraries will be insignificant and imperceptible to the user. On an older drive it will be practically impossible to achieve.

The upside for the user is that the Flatpaks will in general be fully up to date within weeks, unlike those on any distribution.

I've installed a few, having purged the distribution versions so as not to have duplicate apps. Here's what I replaced:

Code: Select all

ungoogled-chromium                              com.github.Eloston.UngoogledChromium                  114.0.5735.198             stable               system
Google Earth Pro                                com.google.EarthPro                                   7.3.6                      stable               system
Visual Studio Code                              com.visualstudio.code                                 1.79.2-1686734195          stable               system
GeoGebra                                        org.geogebra.GeoGebra                                 6-0-790-0                  stable               system
GNU Image Manipulation Program                  org.gimp.GIMP                                         2.10.34                    stable               system
Inkscape                                        org.inkscape.Inkscape                                 1.2.2                      stable               system
LibreOffice                                     org.libreoffice.LibreOffice                           7.5.4.2                    stable               system
VLC                                             org.videolan.VLC                                      3.0.18                     stable               system

and it's working fine. They are more recent than those on the current updated Linux Mint which I'm trying it on, I've not noticed the disk bloat.

I'm still thinking about whether I approve.

[Bryn Mawr]

It’s the old debate, static vs dynamic linkage of your programs - static linkage gives the developer more control at the expense of object size.

Given the amount of ram available to most systems nowadays static makes sense but it will kill older laptops.

[spot]

Nick at youtube.com/watch?v=F-xh7XKsRIo has a good summary today of Ubuntu's dithering about over Snap, which looks like their walk into the wilderness on the same topic. Nobody else looks like they're going that way.