You’re looking at a nearly 900 MB download to get your first runtime. So how big are these runtimes? On a fresh machine, install KCalc from Flathub. Your app metadata specifies what runtime it wants to use and a service downloads it and runs your app against it. Other solutions like Flatpak or Steam download the runtime separately. I just use what’s already on the user’s system. If I ship an app for Windows I don’t have to include the entire Win32 or. This is uncompetitive with Windows on its face. How big should the download be?Īt the time of this writing, the latest KCalc AppImage (if you can even figure out how to download it) is 152 MB. Suppose you want to make a simple calculator app. I aim to convince you that these are not the future of desktop Linux apps. I’ll try to avoid addressing “fixable” problems (like theming) and instead focus on fundamental problems inherent in their design. I’m going to outline here some of the technical, security and usability problems with Flatpak and others. Flatpak, Snap, AppImage, Docker, and Steam: these all provide an app packaging mechanism that replaces most or all of the system’s runtime libraries, and they now all use containerization to accomplish this.įlatpak calls itself “the future of application distribution”. The current solutions involve packaging entire alternate runtimes in containerized environments. Instead, they have decided to ignore and override almost all libraries pre-installed on the user’s system. Despite this, many developers are not interested in depending on a stable base of libraries for binary software. Core library developers are finally seeing the benefits of maintaining compatibility. The stability of the Linux desktop has dramatically improved in recent years. Unfortunately, there hasn’t always been a culture of backwards compatibility on the Linux desktop. Different Linux distributions, and even different versions of the same distribution, have had incompatible libraries. A major problem has historically been library compatibility. Flatpak Is Not the Future ← Flatpak Is Not the Futureĭeploying apps for the Linux desktop is hard.
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