Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Jun 4, 2023 3:28 UTC (Sun) by VA1DER (guest, #165450)
In reply to: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice by gbraad
Parent article: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Flatpak isn't the answer to having a good, integrated installation package. Flatpak installs automatically take more storage and use more memory. For something like LibreOffice which doesn't need help to be bulky, this isn't great.

Flatpak, and encouraging the reliance on it, is moreover an abdication of responsibility for your platform. Every package you encourage to just use a flatpak for is turning that area into Somebody Else's Problem. Any issues that arise are up to someone else to deal with. Which sounds great, but this is putting it in the hands of people who don't necessarily give a wet snap about your platform. Moreover, it's troubling that RHEL is in such a financial state that they feel they can't support native packaging of a major software suite like LibreOffice.

Flatpak utilization is also having the very unfortunate effect of supporting the balkanization of Linux distributions. They don't have to actually work together to commonize their installation mechanism, because Flatpak will just solve that problem.

So it's not just Flatpak to the rescue. Its use has costs in every aspect of a distribution.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Jun 5, 2023 7:20 UTC (Mon) by Rudd-O (guest, #61155) [Link]

I generally do not use Flatpaks (once I installed Upscayl that way, but that's all). All of my software is available exclusively as RPM packages for Fedora and Github repos.

However, I have to admit that Flatpaks make it easier for developers to ship software directly, faster, to a wide audience, and without the direct involvement of a third party like a distributor. If your software can build against one of the common Flatpak frameworks, you can ship it. That's not bad.

The contrast with distributor packages is that you either must wait until someone at each distro picks up your software and builds it, or you must build packages for every distro yourself and then push them to independent reported which others must configure prior to installing your software. And don't get me started with testing on every distro, especially testing of UI-interactive apps.

Do Flatpaks have compatibility and usability problems introduced by running "a distro in a distro"? Yes. I hope these are remediated soon.