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The Future of Flatpak

(lwn.net)
306 points dxs | 5 comments | 22 May 25 23:51 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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enriquto ◴[23 May 25 08:00 UTC] No.44070852[source]▶
Never understood the point of flatpak, snap and the like. Can't you just distribute static binaries? They are not that hard to compile.

(I mean, from the distributing point of view. The sandboxing and resource management is a OS-thing that should be an orthogonal issue. Users must be able to sandbox programs that they don't trust, regardless to how they are packaged and distributed.)

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brnt ◴[23 May 25 08:10 UTC] No.44070908[source]▶
I did not find packaging up an AppImage that is actually compatible across distro's and version all that straightforward, and we were not even using Qt or GTK/libadwaita. How is this easy, in your experience?
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enriquto ◴[23 May 25 08:13 UTC] No.44070933[source]▶
> How is this easy, in your experience?

add -static to your link flags? Sometimes you need to fiddle a bit with the order of the libraries, but that's it.

In the ideal case, for maximum portability, i'd like to use the αpε format!

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sirwhinesalot ◴[23 May 25 09:17 UTC] No.44071267[source]▶
Have you actually tried to make a fully statically linked GUI app on Linux?
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1. enriquto ◴[23 May 25 12:50 UTC] No.44072403[source]▶
Just did it!

I had to add "-static" to LDFLAGS and "-lxcb -lXau -lXdmcp" to LDLIBS, for an increase in binary size from 1MB to 3MB. It's a plain X program, i guess if you use fancy toolkits it may be harder.

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2. brnt ◴[23 May 25 13:51 UTC] No.44072892[source]▶
If anything more than plain X is fancy to you...
3. sirwhinesalot ◴[28 May 25 06:20 UTC] No.44113186[source]▶
Try getting 3D rendering now. Your statically linked libc will fail to load the GPU driver and your app won't work :)
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4. enriquto ◴[30 May 25 09:27 UTC] No.44134432[source]▶
True. And that's why linus showing the finger to nvidia was an exhilarating relief to so many people. The gpu driver shenanigans are horrific to contour, but they are completely unnecessary on technical grounds. All the difficulties are purposefully introduced by the graphics card hardware companies. I'd say "fuck it" and do the rendering in the cpu only, which is almost always possible.
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5. sirwhinesalot ◴[02 Jun 25 13:58 UTC] No.44158931{3}[source]▶
I agree, but hopefully it's clear that there's a major problem all these crazy solutions are trying to work around.