Distributors entering Flatpakland [LWN.net]

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 8, 2022 20:44 UTC (Fri) by dowdle (subscriber, #659)
Parent article: Distributors entering Flatpakland

If this was mentioned in the article or any of the comments at time of writing, I missed it... but Flatpak is only aimed at graphical/desktop applications... and not kernel packages or CLI stuff... so the underlying package manager will still be there and Flakpak isn't going to replace it.

Generally speaking, stuff on Flathub has mostly been third-party packages with licensing issues that keep say, Fedora, from shipping it... so there isn't any conflict with Fedora distro provided packages. That isn't 100% true, because there are more and more packages available as flatpaks that distros package themselves. In many cases, the flatpaks are newer versions than the distro packages, and if you are looking for that newer version, you'll most likely be happy to find it as a flatpak. This is especially true when talking about distros with older runtimes. So, yes... with flatpak you can have the latest / greatest of the desktop stuff with flatpak... an in many cases the version disparity is stricking. Yes, a CentOS 7 desktop can have the same (or newer) versions of desktop software as what you'll find from the latest release of Fedora. That aspect is a big improvement.

In the article a complaint was made that there may be multiple versions of various libraries/runtimes installed... it should also be pointed out that having multiple versions of some things can be a benefit. If you want to install an application that requires a much newer environment or a much older environment than that provided by your distro... often you can't install that software... as you can't satisfy the needed dependencies. Since flatpaks provide what they need to run... it doesn't matter how old/stable nor bleeding edge your distro might be. You can practically run everything... if there is a flatpak for what you want.

I have mixed feelings about preferring a flatpak over a traditional distro provided package... but as long as both options work... most users won't care as they most likely aren't into the nitty-gritty details. They just want to be able to install what they want, and they want it to work. Check.

If you don't like flatpak, don't use it. I'm going to use it though... especially on older systems I want newer-versions-of-things on.

Yes, it may take a while before the build-it-yourself-ers are happy with all of the flatpak options... but again, the vast majority of users don't build their software from source and wouldn't notice. I'm glad they are putting in the effort to appease those that want to build flatpak'ed stuff themselves.

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Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 9, 2022 13:55 UTC (Sat) by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248) [Link] (4 responses)

> If this was mentioned in the article or any of the comments at time of writing, I missed it... but Flatpak is only aimed at graphical/desktop applications...

Yep. And it's only really suited for a single main application per Flatpak as it only generates one start menu entry per Flatpak.

You can actually run other binaries contained in the Flatpak, though, both graphical & CLI ones. For example, I offer a Flatpak for my MKVToolNix which consists of five CLI applications & one GUI. The GUI is obviously the main application, but you can run all the others with e.g. "flatpak run org.bunkus.mkvtoolnix-gui mkvmerge --output destination.mkv source.mp4"

The result is that sure, you can have your office program as a Flatpak, but you'll only get a single start menu entry for it, not one for the text processor, one for the spreadsheet etc.

Snaps, on the other hand, can contain multiple binaries, both GUI & CLI, and those are actually made available via standard directories, meaning you can just run them via their usual executable's name.

AppImages are closer to Flatpaks in this regard, though still quite different. AppImages aren't installed: you only download them, grant them the executable bit & run them directly. There is no integration with start menus, MIME systems or anything else, making them highly portable but poorly integrated. One interesting fact about AppImages is that the name you run them as is passed through to the main executable as its program name, allowing you to simply symlink the AppImage file to a name of one of the executables inside it, and then the main executable can decide which executable to actually run based on argv[0]. Definitely not all AppImages do that, though, as you have to provide your own main executable; there isn't a standardized one. (For example: "ln -s MKVToolNix_GUI-68.0.0-x86_64.AppImage mkvmerge ; ./mkvmerge --output destination.mkv source.mp4")

I'm not saying one method is better or worse; just pointing out some of the differences in packaging.

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 11, 2022 12:44 UTC (Mon) by abo (subscriber, #77288) [Link] (3 responses)

I don't know how it works, but I've got LibreOffice installed as a Flatpak (from Fedora) and it shows up as multiple applications in GNOME.

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 11, 2022 12:50 UTC (Mon) by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248) [Link] (2 responses)

Interesting. I'd like to know how that works, as the LibreOffice Flatpak build file[1] looks pretty standard (albeit huge): one "command" only, no mention of other desktop entries etc.

[1] https://github.com/flathub/org.libreoffice.LibreOffice/bl...

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 11, 2022 20:55 UTC (Mon) by bartoc (guest, #124262) [Link] (1 responses)

I believe there is a default for when you say "flatpak run", however you can install multiple .desktop files that point to different binaries.

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 11, 2022 21:07 UTC (Mon) by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248) [Link]

Yeah, you're right. The manifest documentation[1] does indeed talk about multiple desktop files per Flatpak. Looks like I assumed "single desktop file" due to the other things (application ID, AppData file, Flatpak icon) only being singular. My bad.

[1] https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/conventions.html#deskt...