Spectacle8011

This is kind of a bad comparison. Theoretically, malicious authors could sign their Flatpak packages and Flatpak could verify it with cryptography. It doesn't matter if you're downloading a "crypto-wallet" that's really just a phishing exercise.

Will still be using 4.79 GiB?

It will use more, but not exponentially more if de-duplication works as well as is claimed. The problem with AppImages is that they don't include all of the dependencies, making them less reliable. At the expense of storage space, Flatpak bundles everything for reliability.

De-duplication works better the more Flatpak applications you have installed. e.g. de-duplication saves TheEvilSkeleton over 50GB of storage space here: https://tesk.page/2023/06/04/response-to-developers-are-lazy-thus-flatpak/#but-flatpaks-are-easier-for-end-users

You don't have many Flatpaks installed, but you happened to install applications that depend on three different runtimes (Freedesktop, GNOME, KDE), which is where a lot of the weight is coming from. Install 20 more Flatpaks and see what happens.

Well, if you think about it, the Freedesktop Platform is essentially a distribution. And Flatpak used to be called "xdg-app". If you've got all your graphical applications installed via Flatpak, with GNOME, Systemd, glibc, GRUB and all the core dependencies only packaged for the base system (essentially Arch's core repository), that's pretty much a Freedesktop OS.

Hey, maybe we could use Snaps for the base system and Flatpaks for the userland? Or are these the kinds of ideas that get people stoned?

if you have a flatpak with an uncommon library

In this case, you're responsible for packaging it yourself. This usually means specifying the git URL and build options in the manifest. You can see Krita doing this in their manifest because they don't depend on the KDE Platform, as they need much older dependencies. So they're responsible for over 1000 lines worth of dependencies.

The Freedesktop Platform is essentially a distribution unto itself, and I don't think there's ever been a case of dependencies in that distribution not being kept up-to-date.

Distro libs are less likely to have this happen because very few distros have a bus factor of 1—there’s usually someone who can take over.

Well...debatable. There were over 1200 orphaned packages in Debian last year, many of which had not been maintained in over 3 years.

In general I agree, though had something to add regarding these points:

by defaults the sandbox is pretty good

This is a rather major problem with Flatpak; the maintainer decides what permissions they need by default, not the user. The user needs to retroactively roll them back or specify global options and manually override them per-app, but that's not user-friendly at all. Though many Flatpaks do have good permissions because Flathub maintainers step in and offer suggestions before approving the Flatpak for publication, there are a number of Flatpaks that punch big holes in the sandbox; so much so that they might as well be unsandboxed.

But Bottles has a great sandbox, for instance, which is just what you'd want when running lots of proprietary Windows applications you maybe don't trust as much as your Linux-y software.

It's better than what we have with traditional packages but it can sometimes get in the way and not all beginners can easily figure out how to fix permissions issues with Flatseal. This will probably improve as we get more portals built.

some apps are less maintained and use EOL runtimes etc

Not much is different for distribution-maintained packages, either. See TheEvilSkeleton's post about how there are over 1200 unmaintained packages in the Debian repositories, and even over 400 in Arch's much smaller repositories that are outdated (!). At least Flathub applications are usually maintained by upstream, and so are usually as up to date as they can be.

not suited for some apps like terminal apps or system stuff

This isn't really true. It's only true when terminal applications need privileged access to something. Flathub ships Mesa userpace drivers and NVIDIA's proprietary userspace drivers just fine. You can package something like yt-dlp in Flatpak just fine with --filesystem=host. Hell, they've even got Neovim on Flathub. Sure, it's a little more cumbersome to type, but you can always create an alias.

Flatpak is not suitable for all graphical applications, either. Wireshark's full feature-set cannot be supported, for example.

I would add that:

• You can easily rollback Flatpaks to a previous version (even from a long time ago) with flatpak update --commit. Much harder with traditional package systems, and you'll probably need to downgrade shared libraries too.
• You get a consistent build environment with Flatpak manifests. If you want to build a newer version of a stable package you're using straight from master or with a few patches, all you really need to do is clone it from flathub/whatever, change a few lines, and it has a very high chance of building properly. No need to figure out dependencies, toolchains, or sane build options. And it's all controlled from an easy-to-read and modify file.

Most Flatpaks depend on the Freedesktop Platform runtime, or GNOME/KDE runtimes, which are derived from it. This contains several hundred common dependencies and librarires programs need, like gcc and python. When you update the runtime (change it from 22.08 to 23.08 in the manifest), all the dependencies are updated too. Many simple applications don't depend on many more dependencies than are available in the runtime. Some...have more complicated dependency trees.

But counterpoint: the developer will update the dependencies when they are known to work properly with the application. Upgrading GTK3 to GTK4 in the GIMP flatpak will just break the application. Same thing with Krita and the dozens of patches to libraries it depends on. If you upgrade the application in the name of security before it's compatible, all you end up with is a broken application. Which I guess is more secure, but that's not helpful to anyone.

When my KDE screenlocker crashes on Wayland, all my monitors tell me to switch to a TTY and run a manual unlock. Which is reassuring!

Eminently logical.

I believe all Flatpaks incorporate the codecs already.

Flathub even has hardware decoding with the drivers they distribute. However, Flatpak applications need to specifically opt in to ffmpeg-full rather than the normal ffmpeg package, which has support for patent-encumbered codecs.

Fedora Flatpaks, on the other hand, have no such codec support.

Fedora is a top-tier project and I completely understand why they weren’t comfortable risking patent law unnecessarily.

💯

If I cared one wit about either of them, I'd put money on VLC. If only because Star Citizen won't make it before the heat death of the universe.

VLC 4.0 will be released with a massive change in the interface...eventually.