Flatpak

Jan 29, 2024 (IST)

Low network speeds and limited availability are a fact of life for me. I update my devices every 7 days, and the size of a single Flatpak package (around 350mb on the lower side) is often larger than the regular apt updates, if not comparable to updates that include Firefox, Chrome, Inkscape, and/or Linux.

Perhaps it’s not fair to compare them, but these are my needs, and it’s a pain every time a developer chooses to release their package only on Flatpak. I will likely not use it, and certainly not update it for weeks or months.

The team behind Flatpaks could have instead worked on tooling to smooth out publishing packages. Perhaps documentation for how updates are handled. Maybe include permissions/capabilities in package descriptions. They could have worked with maintainers. Instead they got nerdsniped into creating a whole package format and ecosystem that still suffers.

They have to contend with managing permissions, poking holes through their sandbox, making sure people can’t poke through the sandbox, making it easy to build and publish packages, documenting all of these things, and more. Including relying on developers to maintain dependencies and security.

I appreciate GNOME design otherwise, even though I use the terminal and tiling WMs, but this frustrates me.