Flatpak 1.2 Likely Coming Around Year's End With New Features

Flatpak sucks. Snap has spotify, useful software. FOSS can simply use the standard packaging.

Flatpak and Snap both suck. AppImage ftw.

[oiaohm]

I’m rather shocked that Flatpak developers would want to go to a quarterly releases schedule. In part rapid release are cause many of the issues flatpaks supposedly address. We could easily end up with dozens of incompatible Flatpak releases. Makes no sense really.

Sorry I don't get what you are talking about with rapid. Quarterly release schedule is Linux kernel release schedule and this is not rapid release. Rapid release is a like the wine project a release every 2 weeks.

At every 2 weeks wine requires that it packages itself. At some point flatpak application will have to be packaged outside distributions because distributions updates are too slow. Kernel features flatpak needs is not increasing.

I would suspect that flatpak application packaging lands after libcapsule work lands in flatpak. Nvidia driver releases are about every 7 days. I am sorry but a 3 month release cycle is not what you call rapid.

The cure to dozens of incompatible flatpak releases is simple release flatpak directly from the flatpak project without being limited by distribution maintainers. We already know due to endlessos that the runtime that flatpak provides outside namespace provides all the functionality bubblewrap, ostree and flatpak need to function. So flatpak, ostree and bubblewrap parts don't need to be built against individual distribution provided packages now.

[LinAGKar]

I’m rather shocked that Flatpak developers would want to go to a quarterly releases schedule. In part rapid release are cause many of the issues flatpaks supposedly address. We could easily end up with dozens of incompatible Flatpak releases. Makes no sense really.

Not really, since they would presumably be backwards compatible.

[wizard69]

I’m rather shocked that Flatpak developers would want to go to a quarterly releases schedule. In part rapid release are cause many of the issues flatpaks supposedly address. We could easily end up with dozens of incompatible Flatpak releases. Makes no sense really.

[pal666]

FOSS can simply use the standard packaging.

who will do foss packaging for zillion of distros?

[Ananace]

Flatpak sucks. Snap has spotify, useful software. FOSS can simply use the standard packaging.

Amusingly enough, Flatpak had Spotify packaged well before there was a Snap for it, though that was also before they had Flathub as a central repository so the original repo doesn't remain.

After some quick googling, it seems like the Spotify Snap appeared around December 2017, while there's a post by the Flatpak founder discussing the Spotify package posted at October 2016. I also found a post describing how to install Spotify on Flatpak posted in July 2016. So even in the most pessimistic scenario Flatpak was still ahead by over a year - more realistically a year and a half.


I even submitted a few issues and PRs against the Flatpak back then to get local files working, as Spotify had unmentioned dependencies on zenity and a very specific ffmpeg version only used for local file access.
Heck, Spotify was actually one of the main reasons I actually started using Flatpak on my systems, as I was tired of the mess of dependencies it was. I had even also looked at doing a docker image back then, just to be able to get the dependencies out of system paths.

[rtc123]

Flatpak sucks. Snap has spotify, useful software. FOSS can simply use the standard packaging.

Have you even used flatpak? flatpak has spotify and pretty much everything snap has. flatpaks have been a much better experience for me even on ubuntu.

[oiaohm]

Flatpak sucks. Snap has spotify, useful software. FOSS can simply use the standard packaging.

https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.spotify.Client

I guess never checked what flatpak flathub provides.

People are going to the effort to make programs that are provided in snap format to be provided in flatpak format.

There is a reason. The heavy usage of loop devices by snap comes a nightmare. The more snap applications you install the slower you system boot and shutdown becomes. Ostree under flatpak does not use loop devices so does not suffer from this problem.

Now if snap changed in future to something that was not a loop device nightmare maybe then it would be a true long term competitor to flatpak.

[oiaohm]

Typo?

"using the host OpenGL drivers"

should be

"using the host GL drivers".

Not a typo. https://www.opengl.org/

Yes a lot of people short OpenGL drivers to GL drivers but that is wrong.

https://opensourceforu.com/2015/08/generating-computer-graphics-with-opengl/

Very badly wrong. GL came OpenGL in 1992. So a host GL drivers would be something before OpenGL 1.0 I don't think anyone wants to be using that.

SGI GL full name is IRIS GL (Integrated Raster Imaging System Graphics Library) and that is only for the IRIX operating system.

Host GL drivers when you get to the correct term usage means you better be running IRIX operating system. If you are not running the IRIX operating system you have incorrectly shorted OpenGL. The write up is right you are unfortunately wrong.

[Jumbotron]

Thanks to all for the continuous improvement of the acknowledge leader in Linux package distribution.