Flatpaks aren’t perfect, but I think it’s a good solution to the fragmentation problem that is inherent to Linux.
Haters aren’t worth listening to. Doesn’t matter if it is flatpak, systemd, wayland, or whatever else. These people have no interest in a discussion about merits and drawbacks of a given solution. They just want to be angry about something.
Wayland gets the hate because compositors are authoritative so you cannot e.g. install your own window manager, taskbar, etc. It would be good if there were specifications governing these, but there isn’t.
Laughs in AUR
If I can choose between flatpack and distro package, distro wins hands down.
If the choice then is flatpack vs compile your own, I think I’ll generally compile it, but it depends on the circumstances.
Why?
Because it’s easier to use the version that’s in the distro, and why do I need an extra set of libraries filling up my disk.
I see flatpack as a last resort, where I trade disk space for convenience, because you end up with a whole OS worth of flatpack dependencies (10+ GB) on your disk after a few upgrade cycles.
I mean it’s 2024. I regularly download archives that are several tens or even over 100 GB and then completely forget they’re sitting on my drive, because I don’t notice it when the drive is 4TB. Last time I cared about 10GB here and there was in the late-2000s.
Great that you have 4tb on your root partition then by all means use flatpack.
I have 256Gb on my laptop, as I recall I provisioned about 40-50gigs to root.
I’m sorry. I didn’t realize people were still regularly using such constrained systems. Honest. I’ve homebuilt my PCs for the last 15 years.
