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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • flatpak distribution is generally done by the developer as a common packaging method. if a distribution wants a native install it’s up to package maintainers of the distribution to support the application. although the package maintainers have to make sure they’re packaging the right versions of dependencies which becomes a problem known as dependency hell.

    in your example of handbrake it’s true the main application is pretty small but that’s because it relies on libraries and is a wrapper for ffmpeg. even if you install through a package manager you still need to compare the total size of dependencies.

    the disc space usage becomes a problem due to installing libraries both natively and in sandbox. however if you keep a relatively small system install and install applications through flatpak the disc usage will be pretty negligible. if disc space is really a concern then using something like btrfs with compression+dedup would probably solve most problems.


  • it’s great for applications that are notorious for requiring specific versions of libraries and can cause dependency hell. moves unnecessary system dependencies into a sandbox. for me this means i don’t have to enable multilib to install Steam and pull in 32 bit libraries on my root.

    while it does take a lot of disc space it doesn’t duplicate dependencies in most cases. i would say you receive some good benefits at the cost of a bit more disc space, such as increased security, easy installs, explicit app permissions. it’s great for when you have to install a proprietary tool in that you gain control of what it’s allowed to access.



  • given how many targets are supported by llvm there’s really little difference in cross platform support asides from building artifacts for the specific target platform. wrapping package delivery in a package manager removes the additional complexity to the end user.



  • Maybe they could white label a password manager (Bitwarden?)

    not sure starting at which version, but in android you can set bitwarden as a default password manager system wide which integrates pretty seamlessly with firefox and other apps. only place i know bitwarden doesn’t really integrate well with firefox is on Linux but that seems more due to bitwardens lack of interest to implement freedesktop apis.

    i agree though with additional revenue streams, they need to break dependence on Google search engine revenue. maybe spend research on alternative monitization to ads and sponsored content that could be implemented at a browser level and split revenue between browser and websites.