Flatpak’s Future May Leave Non-systemd Distros Behind
(linuxiac.com)
LinuxSystemd is open source. Its bindings are open source. If snowflake distro's want to maintain this compatibility they can maintain it.
That sucks for me as a Guix user. I haven't managed to package a GUI app I'm using from Flatpak so it was a nice escape hatch for me.
No problem. I'm drifting away from flatpak, anyway. Anything that's married to systemd is going to be a problem for an increasing number of people, over time.
Flatpak was a dumb 5 years ago, it's a dumb now, it will be a dumb in 5 years. Flatpak has always and will always just be a dumb.
Every single time I have to use Flatpak they just end up being an unpleasant experience. Every time I think I find an upside to them, it just ends up becoming an inconvenience.
Even the one big upside everyone always claims makes it better the sandboxing. Just ends up being more hassle than its worth almost every single time.
What The hell are you doing with your flatpacks? I never experienced a single issue with them.
i don't think it's out there to say that flatpaks can be a bit fucky wucky, but yeah it's not some massive issue, they just need to make packaging harder to fuck up
Even the one big upside everyone always claims makes it better the sandboxing.
Not even that is really true: https://flatkill.org/
Works for me
This centralization of Linux worries me
Yes, but the centralization runs so much deeper! We should ditch the centralized linux kernel and create at least 10 completely new kernels that are barely compatible to each other but will ensure our freedom and provide choice to the community!
BSD has entered the chat.
That Hurds 😜
It shouldn't. Linux users are like cats. The harder you try to herd them in one direction, the more directions they find to go. Just because they all happen to be in one place at one particular time doesn't mean they will suffer any obligation to stay there the moment someone decides they want them to.
Sadly I just dont think this is true. For now non systemd distros work fine but eventually if this course doesn't change you'll be heavily inconvenienced at the best and downright struggling at the worst if you choose to not use it I fear.
That's because systemd is just good, if it stops being or something better comes along, people will move. There's no loyalty or entrapment here. This would be bad if a company did it with proprietary software, because then the company could lock people in... this is just nothing like that.
Right, I don't think its actually 'bad' in anyway centralization is convienient! I just think its overall terrible for the users. While jumping ship obv can happen every hour spent on developing one option means that get rid of it as you have more systems to remake.
Meow. I mean... exactly.
Linux users are like cats. The harder you try to herd them in one direction, the more directions they find to go.
This comparison genuinely made me laugh because it's so true. 🤣
It's less that and just the absolute ridiculous scope creep of systemd. Again it was meant to just replace init. All it needs to do is boot the kernel and run at launch services, and people disagree on that last part.
It shouldn't be basically a second layer to the kernel in both application and necessity.
systemd is a name for a set of modular tools. That would be like saying that GNU is scope creeping and should stay in their lane.
Systemd should've stayed in its lane instead of wildly taking up the whole road like an entitled asshole.
Why? Systemd is open source.
Coincidentally, today I removed systemd from my laptop (Debian Trixie.) It was reasonably easy. I booted from a USB drive into a shell through debian's "rescue" mode and typed plausible-looking apt commands until it worked. For some reason it didn't create /etc/inittab and I made a typo when I tried to do it myself, but other than that no problems. Differences noticed so far that a normal user would care about: none. If nothing goes wrong I guess I'll do the same on my desktop at home this weekend, because why not.
Nothing against systemd, but I think it's valuable to continue having other options and it was fun to see that it's still pretty easy to use them (maybe harder if you're a GNOME user, idk.)
I find it extremely hard to believe that worked, let alone left you with a bootable system, let alone properly working.
You know, just maybe...this whole doomsaying about systemd running everything on a Linux system is a bit overblown?
I was surprised as well. I found the instructions at debian.org somewhat confusing, and I'm not sure if they're completely comprehensive or accurate — but they were the most useful reference I found and provide a good idea of what it's like.
NixOS is the only thing that made systemd a reasonable tool for me.
I do not like the entire paradigm of how it works.
I love NixOS, but I hate how coupled to systemd it is.
I tried to make a microVM image of NixOS the other day, using tini as the init system. Large parts of the core NixOS lifecycle simply don’t work at all without systemd.
Another poster mentioned this. Here’s Finix: https://github.com/finix-community/finix
And here’s Sixos: https://codeberg.org/amjoseph/sixos
They both replace systemd. Both very interesting projects. Finix is reportedly daily-drivable but I’d steer clear of SixOS for anything but learning about alternative init systems. The talk linked from the repo is mind-altering; This SixOS guy is utterly brilliant.
Maybe Guix or Finix?
Ah hell, I keep seeing recommendations for Guix. I guess I’ll have to try it out soon.
It would be hilarious though, because in addition to wanting to get off of systemd I would like to try getting off of glibc. If the answer to “no systemd” is “more GNU”, that would be poetic.
Guix is your friend with an infinitely better language
OH NO, they must be devastated!
Looks like postmarketos already put in work to have systemd working in it. That takes care of my concerns there
Guaranteed absence of flatpak will be a motivation for some to choose a non-systemd distro
Flatpak has been pretty optional on most distros I've used. Snap on the other hand...
apt install firefox
Look inside: snapd installed
One of the reasons I've been avoiding or actively moving off Ubuntu these days. The snap ecosystem is bloated AF
I've lived without Flatpak for over 20 years. I'm not worried.
Omw to switch my arch to a selfwritten init manager /s
Just boot into kernel command line and start your services manually.
in Haskell or Rust?
C
C++
Probably, yeah. I'd start in C and realize I do actually like C++ concepts and styles too much to continue in C.
Why are people using flatpak again?
I have an atomic distro, and it lets me install apps without having to reboot or spin up distrobox.
They're somewhat sandboxed, likely to be up to date, and it behaves similarly across different machines. It's nice for GUI programs that don't need access to the wider system, and it won't mess with anything else that I already have installed. I guess it would have similar pros and cons as containerization with Podman/Docker?
I get the vast majority of my GUI programs from Flathub. I didn't know there was a controversy with it, other than just wanting a different way of doing things.
Yea I love Flatpak. No dependency hell, works great in Discover, never need to pipe curl into bash for some huge installer script, it gives a little bit of safety with sandboxing, and you can even install/update without the admin password
I almost always favor it except for something more core to the system (web browser, Steam... that's about it lol)
Because it just works, and updates faster than apt.
Everything updates faster than apt, and AppImages just work if that's the standard we're going with.
I don't hate AppImages, but they're not as convenient as Flatpak
How? I dont think its possible to be more convenient than an AppImage.
AppImages don't go in Discover with all my other programs. They don't auto update, no review system, no way to cleanup the files they created when uninstalling, I have to manually add shortcuts to my app launcher. Also Flatseal is pretty cool.
I've tried Gear Lever, but in my experience it hasn't ever succeeded in updating an AppImage for me. And it's kind of awkward giving it an AppImage file so it can move the file, instead of the download and the installation being the same single action.
One thing a lot of people don't know about Flatpak is that you can get .flatpakref files like Kdenlive uses for their daily builds. Very cool!
https://cdn.kde.org/flatpak/kdenlive-nightly/org.kde.kdenlive.flatpakref
https://kdenlive.org/download/
How do you know an update has been released? How do you upgrade it?
Gear Lever?
That's interesting, so it requires flatpak to install, but why would you when you already use flatpak?
Use AppImageLauncher or Gear Lever.
Because at least with flatpak I don’t end up with app files littering my system and personal folders.
macOS’s application format used to be the best. It’s kind of a mess now with half of apps following xdg, some writing to the app folder, some application support and some iCloud Drive.
But it used to be good.
A clean home directory is the best selling point for me with flatpaks
Bait for newbs. Gotta love the sensational crash outs 🤣
