Flatpak's New Repo Format For Greater Flathub Scalability, More Architectures To Come

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Flatpak's New Repo Format For Greater Flathub Scalability, More Architectures To Come

Flatpak and the Flathub "app store" and build service are rolling out a new repository format in order to scale better now that there are around one thousand applications on Flathub...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Flatpak-New-Repo-Format

[uid313]

Sometimes the dependencies are very large, like you want to download a simple Hello world app its like a gigabyte for the runtime.

I use GNOME Software, the software store app, and I would like to hide proprietary software, because I do not want to be tempted, nor do I wish to get advertised applications that I will never install on my system, and I don't want any proprietary software installed on my system by mistake.

[oleid]

Jup, the runtime is not small, similar to using a docker container with graphical dependencies. But that is the price for being portable. At work, we nowadays use flatpak for archiving project specific apps. Historically, they only compiled on certain versions of our desktop installations, e.g Ubuntu 14.04 or Debian and 9. As they provide certain compiler versions and boost versions. Now, we can be revived if ever needed and we aren't bound to certain desktop versions.

[Anvil]

Sometimes the dependencies are very large, like you want to download a simple Hello world app its like a gigabyte for the runtime.

I use GNOME Software, the software store app, and I would like to hide proprietary software, because I do not want to be tempted, nor do I wish to get advertised applications that I will never install on my system, and I don't want any proprietary software installed on my system by mistake.

you use Windows, so dont talk shit

[szymon_g]

I know I may risk starting a flame war, but in 2020 (2021 soon) what are the benefits of using flatpaks over the snaps (especially when snaps don't have to be used on ubuntu systems only)? which one offer more applications? what about the security? does snap support delta updates?

[kon14]

Sometimes the dependencies are very large, like you want to download a simple Hello world app its like a gigabyte for the runtime.

The runtimes are shared between Flatpaks though, so you'd probably only end up with a handful of them regardless of how many apps you end up installing.
Unless you mix and max Flatpaks from a ton of different repos all relying on their own runtimes and whatnot.
The most well known ones being org.freedesktop.Platform, org.gnome.Platform, org.kde.Platform and org.fedora.Platform, the latter being Fedora's own repo that you're probably not going to use unless you're on Fedora, but then again for most stuff you might as well install the builds from Flathub as they're usually better.

I use GNOME Software, the software store app, and I would like to hide proprietary software, because I do not want to be tempted, nor do I wish to get advertised applications that I will never install on my system, and I don't want any proprietary software installed on my system by mistake.

You'll soon be able to do just that.
Below quote from 9to5linux's blog post.

Furthermore, the new summary file format enables support for repositories to publish named subsets and
to allow clients to declare the subset they want to see. This translates to repositories like Flathub being able to mark all FOSS apps and allow users to use a so-called flathub-foss remote without the need for Flathub to maintain two separate repos.

[oleid]

I know I may risk starting a flame war, but in 2020 (2021 soon) what are the benefits of using flatpaks over the snaps (especially when snaps don't have to be used on ubuntu systems only)? which one offer more applications?

• AFAIK snap provides more applications, especially since it is easier to package apps like chromium, which don't work (well) when being sandboxed.
• It would seem that flatpaks are smaller than snaps. For example inkscape has about 109 MiB flatpaked and about 183 MiB as snap.
• It would seem flatpak is still more widely available. You can even install it on alpine linux.
• Not sure if it is still true: building snaps only used to be possible on Ubuntu

[kon14]

I know I may risk starting a flame war, but in 2020 (2021 soon) what are the benefits of using flatpaks over the snaps (especially when snaps don't have to be used on ubuntu systems only)? which one offer more applications? what about the security? does snap support delta updates?

Flatpaks:

• have shared runtimes (and extensions to these) that preserve disk space, bandwidth and are easier to update
• are endorsed by everyone vs Snaps merely being in distros' repos due to Canonical packaging snap for them
• are repo agnostic, whereas in order to use any other snap repo but Canonical's proprietary one you'd have to rebuild and distribute a different build of the snap package manager itself
• offer customizable permission handling and overrides
• support theming through Flatpak installed themes (Snap does sth similar), but you may also --persist=~/.themes to pretty much use system themes.
• load faster and use less RAM (as runtime libs are shared)

I only know of a few proprietary apps supporting Snap but not Flatpak, but Flatpaks generally offer more options (including an official Flatpak for Firefox from Mozilla etc).
The largest repo is obviously Flathub. There's also Flathub-beta, Gnome's and KDE's own repos as well as Fedora's to name the most notable ones.

[jo-erlend]

Flatpaks:

• have shared runtimes (and extensions to these) that preserve disk space, bandwidth and are easier to update
• load faster and use less RAM (as runtime libs are shared)

It has been more than half a decade since snapd gained support for sharing of dependencies. Literally. It was implemented some time in the first half of 2015.

[uid313]

you use Windows, so dont talk shit

I mostly use Ubuntu, but at work I use Windows 10.
I like both Ubuntu and Windows 10, I know there are lots of fundamentalists here hates Windows and insists that it is bad, but I like Windows 10 and think it is an great operating system. I also like Linux.

The runtimes are shared between Flatpaks though, so you'd probably only end up with a handful of them regardless of how many apps you end up installing.
Unless you mix and max Flatpaks from a ton of different repos all relying on their own runtimes and whatnot.
The most well known ones being org.freedesktop.Platform, org.gnome.Platform, org.kde.Platform and org.fedora.Platform, the latter being Fedora's own repo that you're probably not going to use unless you're on Fedora, but then again for most stuff you might as well install the builds from Flathub as they're usually better.

Yeah, which is great if all your apps are Flatpak apps, but if you got no Flatpak apps on your system then just want one app on Flatpak, then its not so fun when it needs to get runtime for just that one app.

Also I think there runtime for Python, Rust, etc. But I don't know about that. So its many different runtimes.

You'll soon be able to do just that.
Below quote from 9to5linux's blog post.

Oh, that is great! This is something that has bothered me for some time now, and I actually thought they intentionally designed it that way to push proprietary software in our faces.