this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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Free and Open Source Software
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Just a shot in the dark, but it sounds like you have never maintained software. If you have, then my apologies, but your experience must not have included much by way of dependency and version management. Dependencies and versions are a major source of headache for any software engineer and it’s a problem of our own making.
Having completely self-contained applications, while more bloated, makes maintenance and distribution exceedingly simpler and puts the burden of managing that solely on the developer of said application instead of burdening everyone down the line.
I remember when package managers didn’t exist. It was painful. This is the next step in the evolution of the Linux desktop that was mostly solved in Windows and effectively completely solved on macOS since some early 10.x version.
I would not call it a next step. Just another option. The big downsides include much larger on block storage size and worse yet much bigger memory foot print since your app cannot benefit from shared images. Worse system integration too.
In a world where block storage is huge and cheap and memory too maybe less important. I would not say it is without issues though. Maybe convenient but not optimal in a lot of ways.
Flatpak does try to account for storage size by using shared base images. The main problem is that some Flatpak apps don't update to the latest base, and some use different base images altogether, meaning most of the time it needs to have several bases anyway.