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I think this is funny, but it's hard for me to hate too much on flatpaks. Disk space is practically free now, and having spent a good chunk of my career fighting DLL hell, I have a lot of sympathy for the problem it's trying to solve.
Its good and bad. Bad because the base system cant use it and its not the main packaging choice.
Lots of good apps like OBS use outdated runtimes, which simply should not be used anymore. I am not sure if this is a security issue but probably it is, and it creates this unnecessary Runtime bloat.
I hate this philosophy so much! I hate developers for it! It's like they gave up on even trying to do anything about retrocompatibility and managing libraries and dependancies.
Anyway it will collapse soon. I just wish it was sooner.
Honestly I get both sides of it. Your view makes sense as an end-user and from a philosophical perspective. But some people have legacy software that needs conflicting dependency versions, for instance. It’s just a trade-off.
Yeah, package maintainers should have their dependencies figured out. "Managing dependencies is too hard" is a distro packager's problem to figure out, and isn't a user problem. When they solve it and give you a package, you don't need to figure it out anymore.
Plus, frequent breaking changes in library APIs is a big no-no, so this is avoided whenever possible by responsible authors. Additionally, authors relying on libs with shitty practices is also a no-no. But again, you don't need to worry about dependences because your packager figured this out, included the correct files with working links, and gave them to you as a solved problem.
Honestly this. It's so nice to not have to hunt for a specific library that depends on 20 other libraries. I'd rather pay in disk space than deal with that.
You also pay in security holes.
Some people have limited bandwidth for downloads, and a simple program can run to more space than a basic distro.
I can't use flatpak because each update for a few apps is hundreds of megs and my internet is only 2 Mbps.
That too :-/