Flatpak Is Not the Future https://social.isurf.ca/display/c443a55c-4161-d48a-392e-680782762352
@daniel01 I'm inclined to disagree on two fronts. First, storage is fairly cheap nowadays, everything I use as a personal computer has 1TB at least. Second, I have over 60 apps installed from 3 different remotes using multiple different runtimes and the total size of ~/.local/share/flatpak/ is 13GB and I use no system remotes so that's everything. Sure, some apps use a specific runtime for their application which adds GBs but it's a small price to pay for securing proprietary software etc.
We are talking about 9.1MB vs 1.1GB... 😱
Not sure how you make such long posts, mine is limited to 500 characters!
I agree that price point is out of the reach of some people but then you would have to weigh speed Vs space and maybe pick up a normal HDD (~$20 for 1TB). I'm from the UK so I'm roughly guessing exchange rate.
I just installed Lagrange on flatpak and it was 3.1MB because the runtime was already on my system. I'm guessing that AppImages use the local runtime to run properly?
Flatpak can be used for software not yet available for your distro but it is inconvenient and I won't use it anymore, for instance In order to use Lagrange, which is itself a small MB binary, the appimage bundle comes with 88MB of weight while with Flatapak requires 1.1GB of your storage, honestly for the latter doesn't make sense using it.
Surely is better using Flatpak for proprietary crap rather than to install it on your bare OS but a this point better using other technology like bubblewrap. However based on the article Flatpak doesn't resolve the issues for software vendors to bring their (closed) products on Linux.
Flatpak/Snap exist for one reason, sponsored distros do not want anymore taking care of third party software, or all the software that is not relevant for their business. They made convenient for developers to publish software at our expensive. However the sponsors behind those projects are marketing all of this as a community effort, a technology improvement, etc... But it is just their problem not our problem.
Any other distro that is really community driven an based on volunteering doesn't have this issue with the universal packaging, since no one is paid and everything is done by passion there is not any concerning about maintaining and packaging software, as well there is not any interest on attract software vendors.