WHYYYYY Immutable distros, whyyyy flatpaks, those are abominations
bwa i’m not immutable also flatpaks are not that bad imo from a dev standpoint
as someone who uses flatpacks heavily, literally what is anon’s deal?
this anon is just wrong. Flatpaks have many benefits over traditional packages or competing package formats such as snaps or appimages.
Flatpak - sandboxes all installed packages by default. Want it to read your files? You can use flatseal to let it.
Snaps - no sandboxing, and forces auto updates, slowing down your system. This offers little to no benefit over a regular package
Appimage - these are portable applications that run on any linux system with little effort. However, they also lack any sandboxing, at least my default.
Now that we have that sorted, why use these in the first place? Stability. When you use a traditional package manager, you are messing with /bin and /usr/bin, critical directories that doing the wrong thing to can mess up your system. Sometimes an unexperienced user may mess it up by accident. Check out ltt’s linux challenge for a good example of that. These formats typically operate outside of those directories, often in userspace. Another benefit is you don’t need sudo permissions to install a flatpak. These two benefits also make these uniquely useful for immutable root distros. For the uninitiated, an immutable root distro doesn’t let you write to your root. Why would you want this? Stability. Take steamos 3 as an example. It is an immutable root distro for a handheld game console. It is configured for people who have never even heard of linux before. What better way could there be to make sure no one can break it? Another use case is for workstation distros, such as fedora silverblue. Want linux systems for your workplace without the worry of people breaking their setups even with sudo? Immutable root does this well. But then, how do you install packages? Flatpak or appimage. These function outside of root making them function in userspace even in an immutable root system.
Now, im not saying every distro should be immutable. Hell, daily driving silverblue on my laptop sucked since i had to reboot constantly. However it serves a purpose and to call it an abomination is ignorant and foolish.