I do that with appimages as they support a portable home. And that location can be moved around.
You can’t get bubblewrap sandboxing with appimages in a user friendly way though, but I think I will start working on that (yes I’m serious).
Flatpak hardcoded ~/.var which I found a really bad decision and they had several issues opened on this which went really bad if you ask me:
https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/46
I know storage doesn’t matter these days, but another different thing is suggesting flatpak “because it keeps bloat down”.
Oh I’m very sorry, I didn’t see the period before the At the expense of storage space
Flatpaks either work for everybody, or they don’t work at all.
Maybe? I’ve seen enough people having weird issues with flatpaks that others don’t have. One recent example was somebody complaining here that the firefox flatpak took very long start, which I found odd because flatpaks aren’t compressed squashfs images and should not be taking long to start up, that’s an issue of appimages and snaps instead lol.
Packaging your software with Flatpak does not mean you won’t have issues. But when you do have issues, you know they’ll be an issue for everybody. So when you fix it, you also fix it for everybody.
Another issue that I’ve noticed with flatpaks is that they are usually built with generic flags, I don’t know if this is a requirement or lazy developer, but this is also an issue that yuzu had, the flatpak was built for x86-64 while the appimage was for x86-64-v2 and that had a boost on fps at the cost of people with cpus older than sandy bridge not being able to use it. (Which I mean if your cpu is that old you can’t use yuzu anyway).
EDIT: And by weird distro I basically meant nix or musl distros, which I know flatpak works on because it bundles an entire distro basically, while appimage tries its best to be compatible with every distro provided it uses glibc and follows the FHS.
On that there is no dispute that flatpak/snap is your only option.
but that can and does cause reliability and probability issues.
Flatpak and snaps have been the most broken on this. Just recently I was talking about issues that I had with yuzu on that. And more recently steam as I wanted to test something…
Also I remember you, you were the guy that didn’t reply when you gave a number that I found very odd (Basically impossible lol):
https://lemmy.ml/post/16669819/11551689
Were you guy that downvoted the comment btw?
Appimages don’t use any deduplication at all and usually package everything in the app.
Yes, doesn’t mean anything if flatpak uses way more storage…
At the expense of storage space
What storage expense? appimage are actually the smallest thanks to their compression.
Compare the librewolf appimage vs a native pacakge, it is 100 vs 300 MiB iirc.
Same with libreoffice, it is 300 vs 600 MiB.
And these native packages seem to share very few libraries, because when I remove them from my system the removed size is that, 300, 600 MiB, etc.
My distro would not be 4.2 GIB if I dropped my appimages for native packages.
de-duplication saves TheEvilSkeleton over 50GB of storage space here: https://tesk.page/2023/06/04/response-to-developers-are-lazy-thus-flatpak/#but-flatpaks-are-easier-for-end-users
The total size 27 GIB for 173 apps works out at an average of 155 MiB per application.
The average appimage is also that size. Like besides very big applications like libreoffice which is 300 MiB and kdenlive which is 200 MiB. The rest of apps are usually 150 MiB or less.
And most appimages are “lazy” appimages made with linuxdeploy, if you do finer control on the build you can get the size of the appimage way way down.
One example is qbittorrent, the official appimage is 100 MiB, while there is a fork called qbittorrent-enhanced edition, and they got the size of the appimage down to 26 MiB
making them less reliable
Hard disagree that they are less reliable, that might be less reliable on weird distros or very minimal installations, but usually the issue is that you are missing a lib and not that the app itself is less reliable, but stability wise, they have been the most reliable, case in point was yuzu, the flatpak was such as nightware that even the devs would talk againts it due to issues with mesa.
And the support channel of yuzu in their discord was full of people having issues with the flatpak that were magically fixed the moment they tried the appimage, due to that issue with mesa being outdated in the flatpak.
But anyway, I will install my applications as flatpak and compare the storage used.
How big is your distro right now?
I am at 4.2 GIB with my distro (artix) + 30 appimages + home. Though stuff like ~/.local/steam is on a different partition.
Will still be using 4.79 GiB?
I will do this later anyway, but I reallly really doubt it is going to get any better, like it is already once again using more storage than an entire distro with 30 appimages + home.
They still use way more storage.
My entire distro + home + 30 appimages (which includes the equivalent flatpak applications as appimage) is 4.2 GiB
While they use more disk space than most native packages, this point is often exaggerated. Flatpak uses deduplication and shared runtimes if multiple apps use the same runtime.
4.79 GiB with deduplication.
Worth mentioning that my entire distro with those applications included, and about 30 appimages is 4.2 GIB total, and that includes the home btw.
I like flatpak as it helps me keep bloat down
Impossible. Like flatpak itself with 5 applications was using more storage than my entire distro with the same apps as appimages on top.
This is another issue with:
https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/46
https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak.github.io/issues/191
https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/1651
Others like valve have just ignored the issue for years, but the flatpak devs decided to argue that it doesn’t apply to them, to the point that one even mentioned modifying the spec so that they are exempt…
because the UX of using a sandboxed CLI app sucks
I think it is more because of this issue because as far as I know snaps have some level of sandbox and you can still use CLI apps as you said.
What can change is the location of XDG_DATA_HOME, (highly unlikely but it is possible, usually it is the user that changes that and not the distro).
This trick fixes that highly unlikely posibility of the Trash dir being moved, add this to the exclude dirs:
${XDG_DATA_HOME:-$HOME/.local/share}/Trash
Appimages I don’t really like because I hate having to go and check manually for updates for each one, it feels too much like Windows to me. But there are a couple of things that only have Appimage versions so I’ll suck it up.
Thanks for the suggestion, but I really want to stick to something like i3, which I think the only thing that is close is sway (and sway is not a perfect drop in replacement for i3 btw).
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/8000
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/8001
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/8002
Actually not even i3 is perfect for me, I had to fork it to apply a patch that they haven’t applied: https://github.com/i3/i3/pull/5521
A few months ago I really tried to switch to hyprland, it all ended with my wasting my time reading the documentation on how to assign workspaces to monitors for hyprland to tell me that the feature was deprecated 💀
Another issue that I had with hyprland is that I could not move a floating window between displays using the move left/right as those moved the window to the right/left of the display instead of a left/right direction.
I also use i3msg to do some mildly complex actions, which I really couldn’t figure out how to do with hyprland, like this one:
https://github.com/Samueru-sama/dotfiles/blob/main/.local/config/i3/config
set $EXC exec --no-startup-id
set $ADUNST dunstify -r 33 -t 1500
set $RX1 i3-msg '[class="Brave" instance="^(?i)(?!web.telegram.org__k)(?!discord.com__app)(?!web.whatsapp.com).*"] focus'
$BIND $MOD+F1 $EXC $RX1 && $ADUNST "Brave" || ( brave & $ADUNST "Launching Brave" )
Which basically the same keybind either focuses or launches the web-browser, but does not focus on the PWA instances of the web browser as for that I use a different keybind.
Another bigger issue that I need to solve as well is that it seems it isn’t possible to do "xrandr --setmonitor extended in wayland, as I use that with my 3 monitors to play some games. (it sets the 3 displays as one).
I have good news, looks like this issue actually just sway only issue, it just happened that on archlinux all the other wayland compositors also have this issue lol. https://lemmy.ml/post/16201068/11320955
Now I know who to report this to.
I cannot believe you were right. It is a arch only issue for hyprland.
I’m on artix linux since a few days ago, but I did not test hyprland on artix yet. I had only tested sway because I had a similar issue with xfce4 apps creating a ~/.config dir, which actually turned out to be a dbus issue which does not happen on artix because they don’t use dbus-broker.
Indeed hyprland does not create the ~/.cache directory, but it does create a .dbus directory instead (something that sway doesn’t do 🤔). So I basically just moved forward and backwards at the same time lol.
Btw don’t tell me you use ~/.var/cache because flatpak hardcodes ~/.var like I cannot do that, I would not accept such defeat lol.
THANK YOU SO MUCH, I have been stuck with this issue for months, now I know where the problem is at least.
Wanna know something? I’ve been trying for about 5 months to fix this issue without success. I appreciate the help.
I haven’t bothered to report this because A) I don’t know who to report this to as I’m not sure what is creating the directory, and B) I’ve already reported other issues I’ve run into when using sway that were just ignored.
Do you mind telling me the application list so I can check that myself?
Kinda odd, I didn’t even know it was using 3 different runtimes until very recently, I just installed the biggest applications that I had as appimages to make the comparison, and yuzu because I use that one very often lol.
EDIT: Don’t you think that on itself isn’t problematic by design?
How should I have phrased my comment so that I wasn’t bashing flatpak?
Such as?