Dont install random stuff to your system guys

I love flatpak but if you aren't using the AUR on arch what's the point?!

Wait people don’t just install arch to say that they use it ?
- I love Arch but I hate installing and configuring it.
Arch wiki
- I mean most of it works for every distro, not just arch.
The Arch repos, being quick, rolling, not restricted legally or being upstream of some corpo distro like Fedora or OpenSUSE etc

Idk ask Steam?
There are people that choose flatpak for some apps and the AUR for other apps I heard from a friend 🌚
I just want new packages and Tumbleweed sucks, and don't even get me started on Fedora and their codec nonsense. Every time I tried Fedora I run into issues. You can't even use their packaged version of VLC cause they don't also package the correct version of ffmpeg. Fedora is a joke. Nobara even worse cause that one is outdated on top of it. Arch is the way and you are all wrong.
- Don't you ever talk to me or my wife's distro ever again
- Agree on the Fedora problem, but the solution is pretty easy.
  
  # install the RPM packages, your system is auto detected, the packages take care of updating the repos sudo dnf install https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm # enable cisco-openh264 to be sure sudo dnf config-manager --enable fedora-cisco-openh264 # install ffmpeg with allowerase sudo dnf install ffmpeg --allowerasing # or, if you just want videos, without uninstalling anything sudo dnf install libavcodec-freeworld
  
  Thats basically it. On the Atomic variants, installing libavcodec-freeworld is just as easy, but allowerasing doesnt work so you need to uninstall everything manually to unbreak ffmpeg. Or you just use uBlue where it is already done and default (this will also avoid any rpmfusion incompatibilities to happen on your device and on the server instead)
  
  Yes this is annoying, but you do that once and afterwards have a current release more stable than Arch, and an old-supported release that is even more stable.
- Ah, a man of culture
- Thank software patents for the codec trouble, not Fedora / Red Hat. They just don't want to get their asses sued for free software
  
  Anyway I can use VLC and ffmpeg just fine with RPMFusion, idk what ur issue is, but judging by that
  
  you are all wrong
  
  i probably just wasted my time on a brainless troll like you.
- What sucks exactly with TW? For me it is Arch in easy mode 😂

Meanwhile flatpack: (unverified)

They specifically only added the repo with verified apps

flatpak remote-add flathub-verified --subset=verified https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
- Which is not needed but a good bonus. VLC and others are still unverified, even though very well packaged.
  
  But I dont care about VLC anymore haha, Celluloid has Wayland support, portals, MPV configuration and is better for watching movies. Not for music though.

Flathub doesn't have the apps i need from AUR.

Fair point. But when apps are on Flathub and people say "I dont care I have the AUR" they need to know.

the AUR has no verification at all

the apps have no permission system at all, so you need to trust them 100%

they are installed on your system and might mess up updates, give dependency errors etc.

their solution does not apply to nontechnical people. If a solution is not scaleable, it is not a good solution
- All you need to verify an AUR package is to read the PKGBUILD file, which is something the AUR keeps on encouraging you to do (this assumes that you trust the upstream repo, which is something that even official packagers of most distros do)
  
  Also a lot of flatpak packages aren't sand boxed enough to be safe and only ends up giving false sense of security to nontechnical users
  
  Your last point is extremely important though, AUR is horrible for nontechnical users (which is why the AUR discourages AUR helpers)
- Some of your points apply to Flathub too and i'm a technical people.

If an AUR package wants to install 137 python dependencies, I usually search for a flatpak instead.

Why is this the case? Have I been installing stuff wrong my entire life?
- Beside what @[email protected] wrote:
  
  If the package wants to install an awful amount of dependencies it means those dependencies are only used by that package on my system. Flatpaks contains all dependencies, so the required disk space would be similar to the flatpak.
  
  My feeling is flatpak install time is quicker in this case, to install 1 flatpak vs 138 AUR packages. I never measured it though.
  
  I only do this if an insane amount of dependencies needed. Some dependencies are normal, if more than 50 than I think AUR is not an ideal way to distribute a software, or also include a -bin package.
  
  If no flatpak available I still install the 137 dependencies, so nothing wrong with that, it's simply the way I like to manage my system.
- @pineapplelover @infeeeee No, some people just don't want to install tons of packages just for an application they want to use to. The more package means the higher chance for system breakage. It's better checking dependencies and pkgbuild before install
Personally i like chaotic-aur because it's already pre compiled
The only aur packages on my is system is stacer-bin (the only cleaner i trust other than bleachbit)
- Stacer for the win!
You can remove dependencies after install, at least in yay, I never do tho.
- That's install dependencies (in PKGBUILD they are called makedepends), python programs usually need them for runtime (depends in PKGBUILD). On the main page of a package they are listed together, but on the PKGBUILD they are separate

I just hate snaps lol

I don't care about flatpaks, overlays have everything

What is "overlays"? You can overlay packages with various package managers from many repos on many distros
- https://overlays.gentoo.org/

I have just had bad experiences with flatpack so I don't want to use it and the aur has the stuff I need and flatpack dose not

I've had nothing but good experiences with Flatpaks/Flathub and bad experiences with AUR/nixpkgs.

Fedora also has it's own Flatpak repo now with it's own runtime.
- Same. Ubuntu AND Fedora Libreoffice, SciDAVis and more where broken, not the Flatpaks.
  
  Flatpak is really meant for the big GUI apps. No problem with small distro packages really. It just takes off the huge burdens of maintaining distro packages for like Libreoffice, which is as big as the Linux Kernel.
You need to be more specific.

You need to think about the background problem here.

When Google made Android, it was web based. Their "perfect sandbox" ironically has no internet toggle. They won tons of marketshare, and iOS is not different here, both restrict apps to containers and have permission systems to reach out of these containers to access sensors, files and other data.

Desktop operating systems are way older and have no such concept. We have mandatory access control with SELinux and Apparmor, but those are (I think) more complicated than Flatpak.

Flatpak is a solution for multiple problems of Desktop Linux Apps at once.

isolate apps with a real permission system

make apps run anywhere

have a single platform to target, so we dont need packagers anymore (for most GUI apps) and can file bugs upstream

separating apps from the system: stable distros can have modern apps (similar to Windows) and Apps dont affect the stability of the OS at all. Also config files of such apps are in their container, not bloating your "oh so good xdg basedir"

These are all extremely important points for a healthy, modern and secure Linux Desktop.

But there are also issues to every point:

most apps are not adapted to this model, which means they need broad static permissions like Pulseaudio, home or even host, allowing surveillance or trivial (even documented) privilege escalation. This is basically how apps like Flatseal work. Pulseaudio has no portal, do apps can listen to your mic whenever they want.

Apps that "run everywhere" will not have distro-specific optimizations. The system needs to run on old LTS kernels to be universal, which means you miss out on tons of optimizations. Developers could just not care, but this depends on the app.

Flatpak is more complicated than Snap (or even Appimage, if you leave the manual signing, monitoring vulnerable libraries and having a manual repo out). So it is not a great experience for "the Linux packaging model". GNOME Builder is a good IDE for it but afaik only for GTK apps.

No issues here. This is the core princible of "immutable" distros like Fedora Atomic Desktops.

If you have issues with flatpaks, you need to be more specific. Maybe it is a packaging issue, or you expect an app to do stuff that is not

haha also nix... because I horde dependencies.