You could possibly also make a shell script that does this automatically. I believe most flatpak ids follow a pattern such as com.github.user.package, for github projects for example. So you could loop through all installed flatpaks, extract the name, and then add the alias.
You can symlink /var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin/org.gnome.Lollypop (if you are using a system installation) or ~/.local/share/flatpak/exports/bin/org.gnome.Lollypop (if you are using a uset installation) to ~/.local/bin/lollypop and run it as lollypop.
Well, Flatpak installs aliases, so as long as your distribution - or yourself - add the <installation>/exports/bin path to $PATH, then you’ll be able to use the application IDs to launch them.
And if you want to have the Flatpak available under a different name than its ID, you can always symlink the exported bin to whatever name you’d personally prefer.
I’ve got Blender set up that way myself, with the org.blender.Blender bin symlinked to /usr/local/bin/blender, so that some older applications that expect to be able to simply interop with it are able to.
Well, Flatpak always builds the aliases, so as long as the <installation>/exports/bin folder is in $PATH there’s no need to symlink.
If you’re talking specifically about having symlinks with some arbitrary name that you prefer, then that’s something you’ll have to do yourself, the Flatpak applications only provide their canonical name after all.
You could probably do something like that with inotify and a simple script though, just point it at the exports/bin folders for the installations that you care about, and set up your own mapping between canonical names and whatever names you prefer.
If you’re separating your application from the core system package manager and shared libraries, there had better be a good and specific reason for it (e.g. the app needs to be containerized for stability/security/weird dependency). If an app can’t be centrally managed I don’t want it on my system, with grudging exceptions.
Chocolatey has even made this possible in Windows, and lately for my Windows environments if I can’t install an application through chocolatey then I’ll try to find an alternative that I can. Package managers are absolutely superior to independent application installs.
Typically Windows applications bundle all their dependencies, so Chocolatey, WinGet and Scoop are all more like installing a Flatpak or AppImage than a package from a distro’s system package manager. They’re all listed in one place, yes, but so’s everything on FlatHub.
This is true, the only shared libraries are usually the .NET versions, but so many apps depend on specific .NET versions that frequently the modularity doesn’t matter.
I’m now confused if they’re saying that flatpak is centrally managed or not. To me it seems centrally managed, both the flatpak ecosystem but your whole machine (repo packages, firmware, flatpak) if you use those app stores. I might’ve misunderstood what they said.
Oh no, no GUI nonsense. Single, simple shell command update for the whole system so that it can be properly remotely managed, please. Something equivalent to sudo apt upgrade
I’ve written a small script that does all the updates (repo, flatpak, docker), verified the packages, does cleanup and shows if stuff needs rebooted. Handy. That way I can do everything from one short command
Definitely. I’d rather have a “good and specific reason” why your application needs to use my shared libraries or have acess to my entire filesystem by default.
Using your shared libraries is always a good thing, no? Like your distro’s packages should always have the latest security fixes and such, while flatpaks require a separate upgrade path.
Access to your entire filesystem, however, I agree with you on.
I only use rolling releases on my desktop and have ran into enough issues with apps not working because of changes made in library updates that I’d rather they just include whatever version they’re targeting at this point. Sure, that might mean they’re using a less secure version, and they’re less incentivized to stay on the latest version and fix those issues as they arise, but I’m also not as concerned about the security implications of that because everything is running as my unprivileged user and confined to the flatpak.
I’d rather have a less secure flatpak then need to downgrade a library to make one app I need work and then have a less secure system overall.
Flatpack can be centrally managed, it’s just like a parallel distribution scheme, where apps have dependencies and are centrally updated. If a flatpack is made reasonably, then it gets library updates independent of the app developer doing it.
“App image” and " install from tarball" violate those principles, but not snap or flatpack.
Um, if it’s “parallel” (e.g. separate from the OS package manager) then it’s not centrally managed. The OS package manager is the central management.
There might be specific use cases where this makes sense, but frankly if segregating an app from the OS is a requirement then it should be fully containerized with something like Docker, or run in an independent VM.
If a flatpack is made reasonably, then it gets library updates independent of the app developer doing it.
That feels like a load-bearing “if”. I never have to worry about this with the package manager.
Define “the OS package manager”. If the distro comes with flatpack and dnf equally, and both are invoked by the generic “get updates” tooling, then both could count as “the” update manager. They both check all apps for updates.
Odd to advocate for docker containers, they always have the app provider also on the hook for all dependencies because they always are inherently bundled. If a library has a critical bug fix, then your docker like containers will be stuck without the fix until the app provider gets around to fixing it, and app providers are highly unreliable on docker hub. Besides, update discipline among docker/podman users is generally atrocious, and given the relatively tedious nature of following updates with that ecosystem, I am not surprised. Even best case, docker style uses more disk space and more memory than any other option, apart from VM.
With respect to never having to worry about bundled dependencies with rpm/deb, third party packages bundle or statically link all the time. If they don’t, then they sometimes overwrite the OS provided dependency with an incompatible one that breaks OS packages, if the dependency is obscure enough for them not to notice other usage.
No, because they’re not apt packages. You can, however, flatpak update them, and you don’t even need sudo since they’re installed in the user context rather than system.
Are those flatpak haters that say that in the room with us right now? The main difference with distro repos is that packages in it are packaged by the distro packagers and everyone who has an opinion on flatpak should know that this is how it works.
Precisely. Flatpaks solve an important problem. Perfect should not be the enemy of good.
Binary compatibility is a sad story on Linux, and we cannot expect developers — many of whom work for free — to package, test, debug, and maintain releases for multiple distributions. If we want a sustainable ecosystem with diverse distributions, we must answer the compatibility question. This is a working option that solves the problem, and it comes with minor security benefits because it isolates applications not just from the system but from each other.
It’s fair to criticize a solution, but I think it’s not fair to ignore the problem and expect volunteers to just work harder.
Also companies are lazy and if we don’t want to be stuck on Ubuntu for proprietary app stability. We should probably embrace something like flatpak. Also when companies neglect their apps, it’ll have a better chance of working down the road thanks to support for multiple dependency versions on the same install.
Great point! At the end of the day, the apps I want to use will decide which distro I main. Many FOSS fanatics are quick to critique Ubuntu, So they should support solutions that allow our distro to be diverse and use all the killer apps.
Because it’s easier to use the version that’s in the distro, and why do I need an extra set of libraries filling up my disk.
I see flatpack as a last resort, where I trade disk space for convenience, because you end up with a whole OS worth of flatpack dependencies (10+ GB) on your disk after a few upgrade cycles.
For a lot of project “compiling yourself”, while obviously more involved than running some magic install command, is really not that tedious. Good projects have decent documentation in that regard and usually streamline everything down to a few things to configure and be done with it.
What’s aggravating is projects that explicitly go out of their way to make building them difficult, removing existing documentation and helper tools and replacing them with “use whatever we decided to use”. I hate these.
99% of the time it’s just “make && sudo make install” or something like that. Anything bigger or more complicated typically has a native package anyway.
I mean it's 2024. I regularly download archives that are several tens or even over 100 GB and then completely forget they're sitting on my drive, because I don't notice it when the drive is 4TB. Last time I cared about 10GB here and there was in the late-2000s.
I don’t know what dependencies he has but my 3 year old system that is constantly being updated is full of flatpaks and all of the dependencies combined are only around 3GB. People see 1GB of dependencies and lose their mind.
Yep that’s all well and good, but what flatpack doesn’t do automatically is clean up unused libs/dependencies, over time you end up with several versions of the same libs. When the apps are upgraded they get the latest version of their dependency and leave the old behind.
I change my opinion depending on which app it is. I use KDE, so any KDE app will be installed natively for sure for perfect integration. Stuff like grub costumizer etc all native. Steam, Lutris, GIMP, Discord, chrome, firefox, telegram? Flatpak, all of those. They don’t need perfect integration and I prefer the stability, easy upgrades and ease of uninstall of flatpak. Native is used when OS integration is a must. Flatpak for everything else. Especially since sometimes the distro’s package is months/years old… prefering distro packages for everything should be a thing of the past.
China’s mass transit is better. Probably we should just hire the Chinese to construct a national bullet train network in ten years like they did in China. But wait, we can’t do that because that threatens the profits of the bourgeoisie, who are the true rulers of amerikkka. Oh well, enjoy your eight hour commute to make your bosses richer!
China also kinda just forces anyone out who’s in the way. To build any new infrastructure the US ends up getting slowed down to a crawl because of red tape and beurocracy. Land owners have a lot more rights in the US.
Unless the landowners are Black or Indigenous. I don’t recall euro-kkkolonizers asking their opinion about colonization either in the seventeenth century or today.
How can you separate one from the other? History doesn’t just begin and end at the convenience of white supremacists. When did the colonization end, for instance? All the euro-kkkolonizers are still here, they just changed their flag and started sending their taxes to DC instead of London.
These “euro-kkkolonizers” were all several generations ago. Maybe you want to pretend nothing has changed, but things have gotten significantly better since then.
I won’t pretend we don’t still have problems. People of color are still statistically lower income, and they’re still affected by all the same capitalist problems that come with that.
The problem is also not the same across the country. Every state has their own top issues.
Why were slaveowners compensated after the civil war but not slaves? If colonization ended in the USA, was all the stolen land given back to Native Americans? If not, I guess nazism is still very much a thing in this shithole!
I’m not taking sides really, but I just want to point out that the US very much DOES still do shit to bipoc communities regarding infrastructure and construction and housing.
They will run a new highway right through a neighborhood. And sure, they offer to buy up the land first usually, so that’s nice I guess, but they don’t pay well for it and if you don’t move they just take it anyway. Rail lines run through lower income areas. Highways too. There are “easements” and “imminent domain” legal fuckery that they use against bipoc people mostly too. If it’s a rich neighborhood they go around, if it’s poor people tough luck to them.
Residential can also get rezoned to commercial and force everyone out.
There are LOTS of legal and quasi legal things that are done all the time here. But even the legal ones are often ethically/morally wrong.
Japan pretty much has it figured out. Bunch of trains, slow or fast, fancy or frugal. Whatever fits you there’s an option. You can get a Pikachu train with a shop and children’s playground if you want to.
Everyone always disparages the cost of public transport but how much does it cost to maintain these highways every year? A few dozen/hundred billion dollars across the country?
In USA they fund maintenance by developing the sprawl. So they are stuck in this circle where if they don’t develop, they can’t maintain, but developing means more surface to maintain, etc.
they’re not really maintained much anymore other than minor stuff. even that costs tons of money and is of minimal benefit for job security of departments doing it. you’ll all be dead before any major development or changes occur. and even if they decided to do something major, the construction of it while you wait for it to be done over the years will make transportation even more unbearable for those years.
Unfortunately, that really doesn’t seem to be true. YT is a monopoly, they do what they want. None of my friends use Firefox, despite me telling them that ad blockers still work on it. They could spend 3 minutes switching to Firefox and losing some of the niche features they have on Opera GX or whatever they hell they use, or they could just watch the occasional 5-second ad. They just don’t care enough. I imagine most users are more than likely like that.
I was getting a “this video is private, log in to watch it” banner on everything yesterday with Brave. The videos still played but I wonder if it’s related to OPs issue.
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