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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • The real question is why do flatpaks exist at all if you can just run programs in containers

    flatpaks and containers use the same kernel tech underneath, cgroups and namespaces, it’s just a specific implementation designed for desktop apps, and it has things like portals and stuff that’s specific for gui apps. So for example, if you use silverblue, you use htop, but it wouldn’t make sense as a flatpak when there’s a full fedora installation delivered via a container already on your desktop, you’d just dnf install htop and move on.

    But not if it takes away my ability to make my system fit my needs.

    This is the problem with the term “immutable”. For some reason people seem to think that these systems take away configurability and freedom to tinker, which is wrong because the entire point of cloud native is composability. You declare what your system is supposed to look like, and then a deployable artifact comes out the other end, that’s pretty much it. Hope this helps!


  • Hi! I made the video and also happen to volunteer with flathub. The reason I’ve called it “cloud native” is because that’s the common term used in the industry already and server people know what that means. “Immutable” is a terrible term that is neither technically accurate or something users need to care about.

    As for the CLI thing. Shoving CLIs into flatpaks could be a thing but that wouldn’t really solve a problem, it would just mean adding one more ocean to boil and someone would have to volunteer to package htop for the 30th time. There’s no need to do that, distros already have htop!

    It’s a better time investment to fix the UX for containers on the desktop, especially since Mac and Windows are already there. :-/ There’s a few options that people are exploring that are worth discussing.

    • podmansh has awesome potential, you just define a system-level container that has init and all the stuff people expect, then it would behave like the distro people are coming from. I suspect this is where CoreOS/Fedora will end up.
    • exo - we have a spec over at ublue to just add container support directly to the terminal, like how WSL/windows terminal does it. This is the approach Canonical is taking with workshops
    • Direct package management in your home dir - also an option, you can just install homebrew, nix, or tea or whatever install packages in your home directory and then it’s totally decoupled from the system.

    I personally use distrobox with the assemble pattern to have what I need on all my machines, but hopefully as time progresses distros will do a better job integrating all this stuff. I hope this helps answer some of your questions!