Response to “Flatpak Is Not the Future” (opens in new tab)

I'm always surprised to see discussions about desktop Linux software place such a heavy emphasis on the security aspect. In practice, malicious software (which is ubiquitous on other platforms in the form of adware and apps stealing personal information) is almost a non-issue on the Linux desktop platform. And I don't see it becoming a bigger issue in the future either. The desktop Linux market is too small and too fragmented, and its clientele are too tech-savvy and privacy-aware on average, to be of interest to Big Ads and co.

The elephant-in-the-room issue, and the one that any debate about the Linux desktop as a platform must necessarily focus on, is: How do I get my application to my users? For historical reasons, there hasn't been a good answer to this question for a long, long time, and anything that improves on the status quo (Flatpak, Snap, AppImage) is indeed (part of) "the future".

Of course, this being Linux, "the future" won't consist of "this one thing that everybody uses". If that's the goal, it was unattainable from the beginning. I love that Flatpak is repository-agnostic. I love that Snap applications update automatically. But most importantly, I love that I have a choice between the two.

> Distributions that heavily push Flatpak, like Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite, Endless OS and elementaryOS, strictly push Flatpak for applications. As a side effect, these distributions have a really small base install as well. As an example, an Endless OS install takes roughly 4.2 GB

4.2gb is a "really small base install" ????? WHAT

the windows users are infecting linux, and it shows

the amount of bloat these days is insane

Is there any way to actually show the details of a remote flatpak package without installing it first? Something similar to apt show <package>?

> you, as an end user, see less storage visually, but data take less space on flash memories compared to hard drives as well.

This has been posted to HN so we can point and laugh, right? Because no other response is appropriate to this absolute nonsense.

> Regardless, I personally believe that it is unfair to blame the backend utility (Flatpak) for an issue caused by the frontend (GNOME Software).

There is no good Flatpak fronted to compare it to. The Flatpak project seems to believe it is Somebody Else's Problem, and consequently when everyone else poorly integrates Flatpak support into their traditional package manager frontend the Flatpak project gets to wipe their hands of it and say it isn't their fault. As a user, I don't really care who is at fault for a bad user experience if there is no good user experience alternative, and the lack of one reflects poorly on Flatpak regardless of who they believe is at fault.

That said, I'll take Flatpak over the traditional package manager with its limited and out of date software collection that requires an army of volunteer middle men to prop up.