Flatpak Officially Announced For "Next Generation Linux Applications"

[computerquip]

Beside your troll or oriented/biased overview (Canonical is evil, blah blah blah), I would say none.
I'm still gonna go with ppas/AUR/.deb/.rpm or alike.

Apart from lazy half-involved parties such as Valve, I don't see the point in these snaps/xdg-apps. Amongst other reasons, linux is interesting in the first place because of the way it handles dependencies and packages.
If it just starts to basically copy the Windows model, then one of the strongest added value of using it is just gone. Meaning we are going towards losing the architecture battle, when we should keep the idea it is better designed without multiple libraries, and fight for this sound architecture principle.
I'm not refusing change for the sake of it (such as Cinnamon/Mate users after Gnome3/Unity), but I don't see the added value here. At all.

This makes me want to punch you in the goddamn throat for not even having an inkling of what you're talking about while stating things as fact.

1. This isn't the windows model. If any comparison can be made, it's to the MacOSX bundle in a sandbox.
2. You've clearly never developed or deployed an application in your life. If you deploy on Ubuntu and it doesn't support a library, what do you do? This is the *entire* reason why the libav and ffmpeg debacle was such a ridiculous mess. Applications can't just bundle the library they want to support. They instead had to have two branches of code to support both or simply not support some distributions that didn't support one or the other.
3. If you make the argument of, "Well the user can just go through a third party to get the libraries", name one other platform that does this. You wouldn't (and shouldn't) even do this on Windows. How do you know that the library wasn't configured in such a way for that application? How do you know the version that you have is secure?
4. As it is now, even if a library is supported by the distribution you're supporting, it may not be compiled in a way that you want it to be to support a certain feature or such.
5. Windows and MacOSX isn't safe when executing third party applications, in that each application can potentially do damage to your system. Linux applications are the same way, even though they're made a little bit more trustworthy by going through a signed package. Flatpak is the most ideal situation where the application has access to only what it needs and nothing more. It can't do any arbitrary damage.

It's absolutely ridiculous how some people don't see the purpose of flatpak. Have you been living under a rock? Or perhaps you'd like to make sure that Linux as a desktop has the qualities of a rock?

Also, lazy half-involved parties such as Valve? They're the reason we have any major push for gaming on Linux. They're a good portion of the reason we have Vulkan right now and a lot of LunarG's work was funded directly by Valve. How can you possibly call them "lazy half-involved"? What have you contributed in comparison?

[You-]

You can't sandbox X11 apps effectively at all, it's not technically possible.

While not done at this stage, I doubt this is correct.

I would guess that this would need a lot of work but each sandbox could run its own xserver instance.

A root x server would be insecure, but a server confined within each sandbox, would that have the same insecurities?

[johnc]

This is the *entire* reason why the libav and ffmpeg debacle was such a ridiculous mess. Applications can't just bundle the library they want to support.

What do you think Kodi and mplayer2 did? Sprinkle fairy dust on their applications?

They instead had to have two branches of code to support both or simply not support some distributions that didn't support one or the other.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

[johnc]

Beside your troll or oriented/biased overview (Canonical is evil, blah blah blah), I would say none.
I'm still gonna go with ppas/AUR/.deb/.rpm or alike.

Apart from lazy half-involved parties such as Valve, I don't see the point in these snaps/xdg-apps. Amongst other reasons, linux is interesting in the first place because of the way it handles dependencies and packages.
If it just starts to basically copy the Windows model, then one of the strongest added value of using it is just gone. Meaning we are going towards losing the architecture battle, when we should keep the idea it is better designed without multiple libraries, and fight for this sound architecture principle.
I'm not refusing change for the sake of it (such as Cinnamon/Mate users after Gnome3/Unity), but I don't see the added value here. At all.

You have to understand that there are basically two prevailing currents of thought in the Linux world today: "Make it just like Windows!" and "Make it just like Mac!"

And Linus sits there with a finger up his ass.

[RahulSundaram]

While not done at this stage, I doubt this is correct.

I would guess that this would need a lot of work but each sandbox could run its own xserver instance.

A root x server would be insecure, but a server confined within each sandbox, would that have the same insecurities?

See http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/28545.html

It works ok as a demo or if you want very little granularity but systems like flatpak are useful because you can punch limited number of holes in a sandbox and allow the applications to do very targeted things while disallowing everything else. With the nested x model, this isn't possible.

[tessio]

I didn't run into such break in Ubuntu with ppas or to the opposite a library blocking a software update for the past 4-5 years. And I have a ton of them.
Hence, no.

Because people wont put major breaking changes in ppas. KDE Neon don't have ppas because they break thinks. Flatpak gives the benefit of newer packages without the break part.

[computerquip]

You have no idea what you're talking about.

You don't seem to even realize that the examples you gave are prime examples of projects who had to choose between libav and ffmpeg. As matter of fact, kodi explicitly only supported ffmpeg for a good while during the viability of the split.

https://www.reddit.com/r/kodi/commen...ation_most_of/

Mpv/Mplayer2/<insert derivative here> had to explicitly support both because they weren't compatible with each other for a time. FFmpeg eventually started supporting a compatibility layer. This wasn't always the case. Here: https://github.com/haasn/mpvhq-old/w...g-versus-Libav

obs-studio, a project I've had the luxury of contributing to in part, also had to make this decision for a time. Now, they use FFmpeg entirely since libav has been phased out. You clearly don't know what you're talking about.

Or perhaps if you gave an inkling of logic as to what you were talking about, you wouldn't sound like a complete idiot.

[ElectricPrism]

...we are going towards losing the architecture battle, when we should keep the idea it is better designed without multiple libraries, and fight for this sound architecture principle.

This is very idealistic. In a perfect world you could use one library for all applications, however, in the reality that we all live in things are constantly changing.

The complexity of application design increases at a exponential rate.

In the sever world, using a single library for all things makes a lot of sense to harden the security layer of the OS.

In the consumer world, the primary goal is to make GUI apps work flawlessly.

Each market, consumer or server optimizes the system for their userbase. A consumer isn't going to know how to fix X11, or a library dependency issue, but a Linux Admin is.

It seems completely reasonable that both Flatpak and System library usage can co-exist and optimize different goals, not to mention it sounds like it is designed in a way that hardens the security as best as possible.

Even in a commercial sense do you know how annoying it is when upstream changes their software and it breaks your commercial product? Take WordPress for example and NextGen Gallery -- when they moved to NGG 2.X their JSON API completly changed, WordPress automatically updated the plugins and clients were left confused as to why all of a sudden the updates broke their websites.

When the developer controls updates it ensures that the application function as intended.

Do you want Linux without Applications? Because that's how you get Linux without Applications. Make a choice. The rest of us have no problem using both to the fullest.

[ElectricPrism]

...we are going towards losing the architecture battle, when we should keep the idea it is better designed without multiple libraries, and fight for this sound architecture principle.

This is very idealistic. In a perfect world you could use one library for all applications, however, in the reality that we all live in things are constantly changing.

The complexity of application design increases at a exponential rate.

In the sever world, using a single library for all things makes a lot of sense to harden the security layer of the OS.

In the consumer world, the primary goal is to make GUI apps work flawlessly.

Each market, consumer or server optimizes the system for their userbase. A consumer isn't going to know how to fix X11, or a library dependency issue, but a Linux Admin is.

It seems completely reasonable that both Flatpak and System library usage can co-exist and optimize different goals, not to mention it sounds like it is designed in a way that hardens the security as best as possible.

Do you want Linux without Apps? Because that's how you get Linux without Apps.

Choose for yourself which model your system will choose, as for me I have no problem using both.

[edoantonioco]

I dislike the closed server and etc from Canonical (I hope that they will clarify all of that soon), but when it comes to the approach to fix the problem, I prefer the Snap packages. Both will keep existing, so it will be fun to see how both will evolve. But right now is AppImage the one than has the crown, its a great tool