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Cake day: August 31st, 2023

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  • It’s the easiest solution to packaging software for Linux that doesn’t mean it’s good, In fact fhe way no dependencies are shared absolutely wrecks my hard drive and makes everything super long (downloading, updating, etc…).

    Where it shines is security but to be honest do you really need an open source app to be in it’s own secure sandbox?

    I vastly prefer nix and I wish packaging stuff for it was easier.







  • From what I gather it goes something like this:

    • every package is assigned a hash
    • every package lists their dependencies through their hashes
    • different versions of packages have different hashes
    • when you launch an application it creates an environment with all its dependencies, this means that two applications that both use the same library at the same version share that library. However if they both require the same lib but not the same version of that lib they don’t share it.

    Which solves DLL hell as far as i understand it.





  • In the case of NPM (don’t know enough about the others) it’s not a general purpose package manager, it’s only for node related packages.

    And yes I think ranking them is relevant Appimages are pretty terrible security wise(let’s download random executables on the internet yayyy!), snaps are getting better but used to be really terrible and to be fair NixPkgs aren’t that safe either.

    Flatpaks are pretty secure, they work well, the stack is fully open source and allows you to host your own flatpaks repos, as well as manage sandboxing parameters. If only they were lighter I could easily see them become the “Linux executable format”



  • clemdemort@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlIs there a downside to Flatpak?
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    4 months ago

    IMO yes but it might not be an issue for you, flatpaks work like windows standalone executables where each app brings all their dependencies with them, the advantage is the insane stability that method provides, the downside is the huge size the app will ultimately take, flatpaks are compressed and they don’t really bring all their dependencies with them (because they can share runtimes) but the gist of it is a flatpak is usually much heavier than a system (.deb .rpm .PKG) package.

    If you are ok with tweaking I recommend nix pkgs as they work on any distro and only take slightly more space than system packages. I have a terrible connection and low disk space, flatpaks aren’t something I can use on the long run.

    Oh and if you’re wondering flatpak >>>> snap > appimages (IMO)