Distributors entering Flatpakland [LWN.net]

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 12, 2022 13:27 UTC (Tue) by amarao (guest, #87073)
Parent article: Distributors entering Flatpakland

The main opposition to flatpacks is that they are slow. Each app start need to do bunch of mounts, and they are slow. It may be less of the issue for giant slow starting things like loffice or python app, but it's definitely an issue for smaller things. Just imagine flatpack for awk and grep.

It adds latency and makes output of mount/DF crazy long.

... And sandbox is sounds like chlorination for chickens. You keep chicks in unsanitary conditions and then wash them with chlorine. Or you ban chlorination and vendors are forced to vaccinate chicks and keep them in sanitary conditions.

Having sandbox for trusted apps sounds like 'not trusting apps'. And I don't want to have to hide my address book from my image editor. It's so unsanitary!

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Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 12, 2022 14:24 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (4 responses)

> And I don't want to have to hide my address book from my image editor. It's so unsanitary!

I agree in general. However, the world is not so nice in reality. I *do* want to hide it from Zoom and Teams because my trust for these is quite low. I don't know how to do this without some kind of sandboxing.

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 13, 2022 4:36 UTC (Wed) by amarao (guest, #87073) [Link] (3 responses)

I a modern world I found a perfect way to run this proprietary junk on my machine. It's called 'browser' and it is already with sandbox and a very good FS isolation. Given that half of modern apps is an Electron-based anyway, there is no substantial differences. Just pin them in tabs.

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 13, 2022 18:22 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (2 responses)

Alas, support for Firefox on Linux for the webcam-using apps seems to be "good luck". Google still says the APIs for blurring aren't supported despite Jitsi having no issue…

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 14, 2022 8:54 UTC (Thu) by amarao (guest, #87073) [Link] (1 responses)

Is it so? I found no issues for zoom and meet. Meet is actually burn my laptop like hell, but it's doing the same with android phone, so I'm not sure if firefox here to blame.

Insofar I got no specific issues with FF/Linux with web applications for video. (Except for some antique Cisco solution with no linux support whatsoever).

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 17, 2022 13:08 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I think Zoom works. Google Meet *works*, but they say that the browser is not supported for background blurring. Which is what Jitsi belies.

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 12, 2022 15:27 UTC (Tue) by jafd (subscriber, #129642) [Link]

I think you mean snaps. Flatpaks don’t mount squashfs over squashfs (although the recent Ubuntu and Firefox snap kerfuffle wasn’t purely about filesystem speed; I think someone had unpacked Firefox’s snap into a directory, launched it, and it was still slow).

But you do end up with multiple shared libraries from different runtimes keeping being loaded again and again, so startup time won’t be negligible anymore.

And yeah, this is my beef too. You work hard so with PIC binaries all over the place you don’t need to play with relocations anymore, now filesystem cache and mmap() can work about as well as it gets, and then you ruin it by making all executables bring their own slightly different versions of shared libraries. There have been times that RAM and storage and electricity seemed cheap and getting even cheaper; sorry, looks like these times are over.