LWN: Comments on "Larsson: A stable base for Flatpak: 0.8"

Larsson: A stable base for Flatpak: 0.8

nedrichards — Wed, 28 Dec 2016 17:23:37 +0000

For what it's worth, over at Endless we've been working on tools to support creating Flatpaks easily for the Electron community (things like https://github.com/endlessm/electron-installer-flatpak but there's more). Visual Studio Code was the first upstream to merge patches based on this but it's pretty easy! https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/pull/16169 If you've got an existing Electron project it's only a few lines of configuration.

Larsson: A stable base for Flatpak: 0.8

halla — Sat, 24 Dec 2016 08:35:11 +0000

Probono is working on containerization.

But... Apart from that, I don't see why you say "If you see one of these in the wild, it was probably a cross-platform GUI app built using Electron" -- that's completely irrelevant. There are appimages of almost everything, Subsurface, Krita, Gimp, Inkscape, Musescore. I have't got the stats handy, but Krita's appimage gets downloaded a lot!

Larsson: A stable base for Flatpak: 0.8

emk — Fri, 23 Dec 2016 23:48:36 +0000

Interesting!

I've recently been messing around with building AppImage applications, which are essentially a single executable file that contains a loader and an embedded ISO image, which can be mounted at runtime. If you see one of these in the wild, it was probably a cross-platform GUI app built using Electron, which is essentially a copy of Chromium with Node.js APIs included. It's an eccentric tech stack, but it makes for a surprisingly nice way to build cross-platform GUI apps, especially since you can do ridiculous things like build native Node extensions using Rust and Neon. The first time you run an Electron AppImage app, it will offer to register a *.desktop file.

AppImage is (essentially) containerized, but not normally sandboxed as far as I know.

Get Flatpak into Ubuntu and not from a PPA

drag — Fri, 23 Dec 2016 15:34:22 +0000

I suspect sometimes PPAs are better then Universe since Ubuntu Universe tends to receive little to no love in terms of version updates, bug/security fixes, etc. The downside, of course, is that users need to know to install the PPA.

Get Flatpak into Ubuntu and not from a PPA

satbyy — Fri, 23 Dec 2016 06:05:40 +0000

Well, Larsson wants to push it in Debian, so it will end up in Ubuntu anyways (in universe, which is still better than a PPA)

Get Flatpak into Ubuntu and not from a PPA

smckay — Fri, 23 Dec 2016 04:01:35 +0000

Is that likely to happen in the near term, though? I doubt Canonical are in a hurry to spend cycles on supporting a competitor to Snap.

Get Flatpak into Ubuntu and not from a PPA

scottt — Fri, 23 Dec 2016 02:05:54 +0000

For cross-distro app distribution, getting an updated Flatpack into Ubuntu, not just from a PPA and not from the universe repo that users need to enable with an extra step seems much more important.