iit: nerds unable to comprehend that building a piece of software from source in not something every person can do

huh? Using package managers almost never involves compiling. It's there as a capability, but the point is to distribute pre-compiled packages and skip that step in the vast majority of cases.

one of my least favorite things about arch and other rolling distros is that yay/pacman will try and recompile shit like electron/chromium from source every few days unless you give it very specific instructions not to

My understanding is that constantly triggering compiling like that shouldn't be happening in any typical arch + pacman situation. But it can happen in AUR. If it does, I think it's a special case where you should be squinting and figuring out what's going on and stopping the behavior; it's by no means philosophically endorsed as the usual case scenario for packages on arch.

There's certainly stuff about Arch that's Different(TM) but nothing about the package manager process is especially different from, say, apt-get or rpm in most cases.

i mostly use them for proprietary stuff or for software that is incredible painful to package (mostly electron apps). i will probably never use them for anything that actually matters but i also use rolling release distros everywhere so latest release is never too far. for testing latest version of any software i prefer appimages since they are simpler and don't need a messy setup as flatpak, but i also won't use them pass the testing phase and i prefer packaging the software if possible.

snaps, on the other hand, will never go near any of my systems. not even by accident

All of this is true and precisely zero normies care about any of it.

The fact that I can put my ~~idiots~~ family on any modern distro and tell them to use the app store alone makes flatpaks king of the app management

Personally I am okay with them actually. I use several on my system and having each app allowed to have different permissions is super useful.

But also I like things that are directly installed cause they seem just a tad faster performance wise.

main selling points are isolation and having the latest version directly from developers without having to wait for your distro to package/update it.

both are debatable since they are not as good as promoted (isolation doesn't always work correctly and it's a mess to configure it once you use anything different than the more mainstream distros) or goes against the historical preference (using bundled everything instead of cooperating with your distro packages and trusting every individual over trusting your distro as a whole) but having the latest version on any distro without having to wait is a popular need so they gained traction quite fast. this might make little sense for rolling release distros (arch, nix) but it's helpful if you have a stable base (years old debian) but need the latest feature on an specific application or have to use very specific libraries that are not packaged on the main distro and would require complex upgrades

There was a few years where I pretty much only used Flatpaks because I was scared of the terminal. But now that I've learned how to use the terminal, it's so much more convenient because I can quickly update all my applications all in one place without having to open a separate app. Plus, some Flatpaks can fall really behind on software updates.

There might be a Linux userbase someday where no one over than developers actually knows how to use the terminal, because users can run everything they want without a command line, but maybe that's actually a good thing because it'll drive up how many people use a Linux distro.

With Windows and Mac, there's a shareholder incentive to enshittify. With Linux, if a distro goes bad and gets commercialized, there's always another distro people can move to, not to mention there's no financial incentive. The more people get on Linux, the less power these tech companies have. Personally, that and privacy are what drew me to Linux much more so than being able to tinker or fine-tune my experience.

It’s extremely context-dependent.

If we’re talking about enterprise-grade, five-nines reliability: I want the absolute simplest, bare-bones, stripped down, optimized infra I can get my hands on.

If we’re talking about my homelab or whatever else non-critical system: I’m gonna fuck around and play with whatever I feel like.

saying it can happen in the AUR feels disingenuous to me when you consider how integrated the AUR is to the arch ecosystem. this is a genuine complaint from a user perspective and is an issue with the design philosophy imo. it is a special case but it’s so frequent as to be annoying, is my point.

not sure why everyone is replying like i’m unaware and totally ignoring the actual grievance i have. im very well aware of pacman and yay’s intended behaviors, i just think they’re shit in some cases. idk if people who say this have never tried to daily drive arch before or something but the AUR is absolutely not optional unless you want to constantly hand roll your own shit. see my edit to the original comment.

saying it can happen in the AUR feels disingenuous to me when you consider how integrated the AUR is to the arch ecosystem. this is a genuine complaint from a user perspective and is an issue with the design philosophy imo. it is a special case but it’s so frequent as to be annoying, is my point.

not sure why everyone is replying like i’m unaware and totally ignoring the actual grievance i have. im very well aware of pacman and yay’s intended behaviors, i just think they’re shit in some cases. idk if people who say this have never tried to daily drive arch before or something but the AUR is absolutely not optional unless you want to constantly hand roll your own shit. see my edit to the original comment.

Wow that's actually big difference, thanks for bringing it up!

Good news, though, is that you are free to install Gimp as a native package, and use Flatpaks for the rest.

Huh?

Either it did something it shouldn't, or the system updated Nvidia drivers every time for no apparent reason. I have an Nvidia GPU, running proprietary drivers, and haven't ever witnessed anything of the kind.

And then there is software like OBS, which is known for being borderline unusable when not using the only officially supported way to use it on Linux outside of Ubuntu – which is Flatpak.

But why is that? I mean just because it is packaged by someone else does not mean its unusable. So its not the package formats issue, but your distribution packaging it wrong. Right? In installed the Flatpak version, because they developers recommended it to me. I'm not sure why the Archlinux package should be unusable (and I don't want to mess around with it, because I don't know what part is unusable).

The wiki article :
- specifically says that packages are not thoroughly vetted
- does not recommend using yay or another AUR helper (which is the primary thing I recommend against)
- has a frequently asked question section that is fairly technical and should indicate that it is not for the faint of heart

The aur helper wiki has a fun red disclaimer at the top that no one reads

you (rhetorical you, not you) can recommend not using the AUR officially all you want. it doesn’t mean anything if a large number of tasks the average user is going to do require AUR packages. i’m kind of drunk rn but i’ll go find specific pages of the wiki that demonstrate what i’m talking about, i stg this isn’t nothing. the core system itself can entirely be managed with pacman, yes, but the average user is going to be doing a lot more than just that. there is a certain discord in the messaging of arch as a whole.

this is exactly my point. arch can either be a nuts and bolts distro or it can be made for normies. it can’t be both.

I'm happy to use Flatpaks but the annoyances I've had are like when one application says to use you'll need to point to the binary of another application that it depends on but very understandably doesn't package together, figuring that out to me can be annoying so I'll switch to a regular installation and it all just works together no fuss, no flatseal, no thinking about it really. Also some applications where it's really nice to launch from the terminal especially with arguments or just like the current working directory and with Flatpaks instead of just right off the bat it's application name and hit enter, Flatpak hope you remember the whole package name

org.wilson.spalding.runner.knife.ApplicationName ...

Ya alias but got to remember to do that. So far anything I'd ever want to run from terminal, no Flatpak

As long as software is available in the Software Manager to be installed that way... I don't care what format it's in.

But don't make normies go to the terminal. It's inhumane, and really does not help the masses get away from big tech - which is a worthier goal than keeping your software terminal-only.

While I wouldn't want flakpak going deep into the OS I think the advantage of using them on the desktop is obvious. Developers can release to multiple dists from a single build and end users get updates and versions immediately rather than waiting for the dist to update its packages. Plus the ability to lock the software down with sandboxes.

The tradeoff is disk consumption but it's not really that big of a deal. Flatpaks are layered so apps can share dependencies. e.g. if the app is GNOME it can share the GNOME runtime with other apps and doesn't need to ship with its own.

Perhaps ironically, this is mocking a strawman. Flatpacks can be installed and managed using the terminal! Not only that but Linux-Distros have had graphical package managers for decades.

The primary reason that distros have embraced flatpack / snap / appimage is that they promise to lower the burden of managing software repositories. The primary reason that some users are mad is that these often don't provide a good experience:

• they are often slower to install/start/run
• they have trouble integrating with the rest of the system (ignoring gtk/qt themes for example)
• they take a lot more space and bandwidth

Theoretically they are also more secure... But reality of that has also been questioned. Fine grained permissions are nice, but bundling libraries makes it hard to know what outdated libraries are running on the systems.

Installing them is not difficult. It's the same as any other flatpak.

The problem is when running them (actually, when running any flatpak, not just CLI tools) you need to type out the whole backwards domain thingy that flatpaks use as identifier, instead of having a proper typical and simple executable name like they would have if they were installed normally.

I end up adding either symlinks or aliases for all my flatpaks because of this reason. After doing that it's ok.. but it's just an extra step that's annoying and that the flatpak devs have no interest on fixing apparently.

Yes, Flatpak is overall a better approach when compared to AppImages, since being dependent on a known runtime ensures the program will run whenever the runtime is available.

What I wish they would add is a way to run the flatpak in a portable way. Because as it stands, AppImages is the only option for that. Flatpak doesn't really allow to have a portable installation in a pendrive, for example. At the moment there's no replacement for AppImage in such use cases, which is a pity.

But there's no fundamental technical design roadblock in flatpak that would prevent it from supporting this in the future, imho. theoretically one could create a program that mounts the flatpak file into a ramfs layered with the runtime and run it.

You are mixing different ideas of freedom.
Software freedom is not the same as freedom of choice of software.

You don't need Linux to have choices of what software to use, you have that in most (all?) proprietary systems, in some you might even have more choices than in Linux.. even if it includes proprietary software.

This is analogous to how being a free person (not a slave) is not the same as having freedom to choose who to work for, even if some of them are slavers (ie. having freedom to choose your master).

it doesn’t mean anything if a large number of tasks the average user is going to do require AUR packages

You keep saying this but can you give any concrete examples? I don't recall coming across anything like this.

Feyd did a pretty good job of outlining the AUR disclaimers in a different comment so I won't do that here. It's true that Arch won't stop you from shooting yourself in the foot, but again it's nuts to claim that routine compiling is the usual case for all rolling distros and belies your claim that you're familiar with usual case experience. There's absolutely no routine experience where you're regularly compiling.

I've used debian and apt-get most of my life, I've used arch on a pinetab 2 for about 6 months, regularly playing with pacman and yay and someone who's never met me is saying I'm a fanboy for being familiar with linux package management. 🤷‍♂️

But why is that?

Because the OBS developers say so.

And since I’m not on Ubuntu, I use the Flatpak version to get OBS as intended bey the OBS developers.

So its not the package formats issue, but your distribution packaging it wrong. Right?

Exactly. Most distributions fail hard when it comes to packaging OBS correctly. The OBS devs even threatened to sue Fedora over this.

gitlab.com/fedora/sigs/flatpak…

I don't actually know if it is a Wayland issue - most of those forum posts are like 3 years old... And I have definitely used these same AppImages in the past on Wayland without issue. I think the AppImages are expecting some specific dependency to be installed on my system that is no longer installed due to updates. (which I thought was counter to the entire point of an AppImage? I thought it was supposed to be kinda like Flatpak where it has it's dependencies in the image? Maybe I just misunderstood AppImage...)

To give you some hope, my Distro switched to Wayland as default a little over a year ago (i think) and I have not been running into problems (outside this AppImage problem, if it is indeed a Wayland issue, which I cannot confirm or deny).

I need OBS on this new computer!

Let's install the flatpack!

V4l problems

Plugins Problems

Wayland Problems

I'm just going back to the .deb, thanks.

Not a fan for a few reasons. Flathub (as far as I know) works on the app store model where developers offer their own builds to users, which is probably appealing to people coming from the Windows world who view distros as unnecessary middlemen, but in the GNU/Linux world the distro serves an important role as a sort of union of users; they make sure the software works in the distro environment, resolve breakages, and remove any anti-features placed in there by the upstream developers.

The sandboxing is annoying too, but understandable.

Despite this I will resort to a flatpak if I'm too lazy to figure out how to package something myself.