Flatpak 1.5.1 Prepares For Protected/Authenticated Downloads - Future App Purchasing

[Britoid]

Do they still ship multiple runtimes each ~700mb in size for GNOME, KDE and other environments ? Linux inside Linux inside Linux inside Linux ...

The name Flatpak is a joke. There is nothing flat about it.

They're de-duplicated. It's hard to see if you only look at one runtime, but when you look at them all you're looking at acceptable storage usage.

[oiaohm]

https://developer.elementary.io/ Its not just snap either. There have been a few applications that were released on flathub that have moved to elementary due to payment system.

[Candy]

They're de-duplicated. It's hard to see if you only look at one runtime, but when you look at them all you're looking at acceptable storage usage.

And all the linking nightmare on the fs and directories with numbering in their names that they created ? Is this still a thing ?

And would someone be so kind explaining the "payment" stuff a bit more in detail here ? Will this also affect hosting of open source projects in near future ? Is it required to have a login in near future to grab the packages, will there be some sort of membership or giving out personal informations... if sho what will happen with the data that got acquired here from the users ?

Questions over questions...

No one here will want to make me belive that running a system like flathub or writing this "cage" kind of system will be free service forever...

[Britoid]

And all the linking nightmare on the fs and directories with numbering in their names that they created ? Is this still a thing ?

And would someone be so kind explaining the "payment" stuff a bit more in detail here ? Will this also affect hosting of open source projects in near future ? Is it required to have a login in near future to grab the packages, will there be some sort of membership or giving out personal informations... if sho what will happen with the data that got acquired here from the users ?

Questions over questions...

No one here will want to make me belive that running a system like flathub or writing this "cage" kind of system will be free service forever...

The numbers in the names are checksums of the file which allows the deduplication.

Flathub plans to only allow open source apps to be sold, so you'd still be able to grab the manifest and build it yourself. Fortunately all of Flathubs infrastructure is open source, so it's easy to see what data is collected.

[oiaohm]

The name Flatpak is a joke. There is nothing flat about it.

You don't get the name. Its a flatpak. Like a runtime at operational size might appear 700 megs. But after is been duplicated between all the run-times the space has not expanded that much.

Think of it like flat pack boxs. How many folded down boxes you can fit in the size of one unfolded box. Flatpak name is a very descriptive to the stunt ostree is upto in the deduplication background basically folding the applications and runtimes up like you would fold flatpak able boxes/shipping containners up to get more space.

.

[Candy]

[...] so you'd still be able to grab the manifest and build it yourself.

So at the end... we'd better stay with the packages that we get with the distribution...

a) they are really flat (no need of hundrets of megabytes of runtimes)
b) no excessive linking and directory creating in /var/lib/flatpak
c) it simply works and is more convinient even for normal users to grab packages and updates from their distributions rather than entering cryptic command line parameters that usually ends in problems.

Thanks for the conversation.

[Britoid]

So at the end... we'd better stay with the packages that we get with the distribution...

a) they are really flat (no need of hundrets of megabytes of runtimes)
b) no excessive linking and directory creating in /var/lib/flatpak
c) it simply works and is more convinient even for normal users to grab packages and updates from their distributions rather than entering cryptic command line parameters that usually ends in problems.

Thanks for the conversation.

1) It's negligible given you're saving 100s of MBs worth of libraries that no longer need to be installed in /usr.
2) I guess Git is bad too.
3) At the cost of old versions. For proprietary software you don't have this option so people grab packages off the web, add ppas, run bash scripts as root etc. These are all bad ideas.

Flatpaks CLI is the best thing since sliced bread.

[Candy]

Flatpaks CLI is the best thing since sliced bread.

Last question:

Will it be enforced to users the same agressive way as done with GNOME, pulse-audio and systemd ?

Explaining the word "agressive" here:

... by making everything else created by others look as if it's broken or not existing ...

[starshipeleven]

Do they still ship multiple runtimes each ~700mb in size for GNOME, KDE and other environments ? Linux inside Linux inside Linux inside Linux ...

It's not a VM, it's all run on the same kernel, they are just pulling libraries from their own runtime instead than taking the system libs.

The name Flatpak is a joke. There is nothing flat about it.

The name Candy is a joke, there is nothing sweet about you.

[starshipeleven]

Will it be enforced to users the same agressive way as done with GNOME, pulse-audio and systemd ?

Explaining the word "agressive" here:

... by making everything else created by others look as if it's broken or not existing ...

Well, for Pulse and systemd they didn't have to try very hard to make everything else look bad.