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Flatpak’s Future May Leave Non-systemd Distros Behind (linuxiac.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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[–] 9 points 5 months ago (4 children)

NixOS is the only thing that made systemd a reasonable tool for me.

I do not like the entire paradigm of how it works.

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  • [–] 10 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    I love NixOS, but I hate how coupled to systemd it is.

    I tried to make a microVM image of NixOS the other day, using tini as the init system. Large parts of the core NixOS lifecycle simply don’t work at all without systemd.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago* (1 child)

    Maybe Guix or Finix?

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    Ah hell, I keep seeing recommendations for Guix. I guess I’ll have to try it out soon.

    It would be hilarious though, because in addition to wanting to get off of systemd I would like to try getting off of glibc. If the answer to “no systemd” is “more GNU”, that would be poetic.

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    • [–] 47 points 5 months ago (11 children)

    This centralization of Linux worries me

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  • [–] 55 points 5 months ago* (5 children)

    It shouldn't. Linux users are like cats. The harder you try to herd them in one direction, the more directions they find to go. Just because they all happen to be in one place at one particular time doesn't mean they will suffer any obligation to stay there the moment someone decides they want them to.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Sadly I just dont think this is true. For now non systemd distros work fine but eventually if this course doesn't change you'll be heavily inconvenienced at the best and downright struggling at the worst if you choose to not use it I fear.

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  • [–] -1 points 5 months ago* (1 child)

    That's because systemd is just good, if it stops being or something better comes along, people will move. There's no loyalty or entrapment here. This would be bad if a company did it with proprietary software, because then the company could lock people in... this is just nothing like that.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    Right, I don't think its actually 'bad' in anyway centralization is convienient! I just think its overall terrible for the users. While jumping ship obv can happen every hour spent on developing one option means that get rid of it as you have more systems to remake.

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  • [–] 27 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    It's less that and just the absolute ridiculous scope creep of systemd. Again it was meant to just replace init. All it needs to do is boot the kernel and run at launch services, and people disagree on that last part.

    It shouldn't be basically a second layer to the kernel in both application and necessity.

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    • [–] 22 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Coincidentally, today I removed systemd from my laptop (Debian Trixie.) It was reasonably easy. I booted from a USB drive into a shell through debian's "rescue" mode and typed plausible-looking apt commands until it worked. For some reason it didn't create /etc/inittab and I made a typo when I tried to do it myself, but other than that no problems. Differences noticed so far that a normal user would care about: none. If nothing goes wrong I guess I'll do the same on my desktop at home this weekend, because why not.

    Nothing against systemd, but I think it's valuable to continue having other options and it was fun to see that it's still pretty easy to use them (maybe harder if you're a GNOME user, idk.)

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    I find it extremely hard to believe that worked, let alone left you with a bootable system, let alone properly working.

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  • [–] 11 points 5 months ago*

    I was surprised as well. I found the instructions at debian.org somewhat confusing, and I'm not sure if they're completely comprehensive or accurate — but they were the most useful reference I found and provide a good idea of what it's like.

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    • [–] 5 points 5 months ago

    Looks like postmarketos already put in work to have systemd working in it. That takes care of my concerns there

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    [–] 5 points 5 months ago

    Works for me

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    [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    That sucks for me as a Guix user. I haven't managed to package a GUI app I'm using from Flatpak so it was a nice escape hatch for me.

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    [–] 5 points 5 months ago

    OH NO, they must be devastated!

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    [–] 9 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    No problem. I'm drifting away from flatpak, anyway. Anything that's married to systemd is going to be a problem for an increasing number of people, over time.

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    [–] 11 points 5 months ago

    Systemd is open source. Its bindings are open source. If snowflake distro's want to maintain this compatibility they can maintain it.

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    [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    Well this sucks. I use Flatpak all the time, so I guess this means I'm going to be even more dependent on systemd than I was before.

    I don't hate systemd as much as most of its detractors; in fact I like how easy it makes it to manage services, but with the age verification attestation controversy, and the performance improvements I witnessed switching my Pi-Hole box from Debian to Alpine, these things have caused me to question my use of systemd.

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    [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    AppImages stay winning

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    [–] 3 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    Guaranteed absence of flatpak will be a motivation for some to choose a non-systemd distro

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  • [–] 25 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Flatpak has been pretty optional on most distros I've used. Snap on the other hand...

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    • [–] -4 points 5 months ago (17 children)

    Why are people using flatpak again?

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  • [–] 41 points 5 months ago* (1 child)

    They're somewhat sandboxed, likely to be up to date, and it behaves similarly across different machines. It's nice for GUI programs that don't need access to the wider system, and it won't mess with anything else that I already have installed. I guess it would have similar pros and cons as containerization with Podman/Docker?

    I get the vast majority of my GUI programs from Flathub. I didn't know there was a controversy with it, other than just wanting a different way of doing things.

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  • [–] 29 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

    Yea I love Flatpak. No dependency hell, works great in Discover, never need to pipe curl into bash for some huge installer script, it gives a little bit of safety with sandboxing, and you can even install/update without the admin password

    I almost always favor it except for something more core to the system (web browser, Steam... that's about it lol)

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  • [–] 26 points 5 months ago (11 children)

    Because it just works, and updates faster than apt.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (10 children)

    Everything updates faster than apt, and AppImages just work if that's the standard we're going with.

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  • [–] 12 points 5 months ago (9 children)

    I don't hate AppImages, but they're not as convenient as Flatpak

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (8 children)

    How? I dont think its possible to be more convenient than an AppImage.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (6 children)

    How do you know an update has been released? How do you upgrade it?

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    Gear Lever?

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    That's interesting, so it requires flatpak to install, but why would you when you already use flatpak?

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (2 children)

    To use App Images! :D

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    For when the devs provide app image but not flatpak or are app images somehow better?

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    That or if you're running an immutable distro like Bazzite and there's an app image available because it's easier than setting up OS-tree layering etc.

    Or you just want an easy way to update app images lol

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

    AppImages don't go in Discover with all my other programs. They don't auto update, no review system, no way to cleanup the files they created when uninstalling, I have to manually add shortcuts to my app launcher. Also Flatseal is pretty cool.

    I've tried Gear Lever, but in my experience it hasn't ever succeeded in updating an AppImage for me. And it's kind of awkward giving it an AppImage file so it can move the file, instead of the download and the installation being the same single action.

    One thing a lot of people don't know about Flatpak is that you can get .flatpakref files like Kdenlive uses for their daily builds. Very cool!

    https://cdn.kde.org/flatpak/kdenlive-nightly/org.kde.kdenlive.flatpakref

    https://kdenlive.org/download/

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  • [–] 18 points 5 months ago* (1 child)

    Because at least with flatpak I don’t end up with app files littering my system and personal folders.

    macOS’s application format used to be the best. It’s kind of a mess now with half of apps following xdg, some writing to the app folder, some application support and some iCloud Drive.

    But it used to be good.

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    • [–] -3 points 5 months ago

    Bait for newbs. Gotta love the sensational crash outs 🤣

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