One of the criticisms people have with containerizing their desktop apps is the "insane amount of space for their environment" that people think it requires. That's a direct quote from a reddit post on the topic from today.
Let's have a look
Today I'll compare two desktops, one will be
Flatpaks aren’t huge at all. This is a debunked myth. I can’t recommend reading this article enough.
My premise is that sysadmin/user time is more expensive than drive space. Seeing some real world examples of how Flatpak could save time over the long run would probably be beneficial for increasing usage.
Keep in mind I have no dog in this fight, I don’t have a preference of one over the other. I only made that comment because everytime I see a Flatpak reference on the web it’s always in the context of disk usage.
I don’t think many sysadmins will be dealing with Flatpak. For server solutions, there’s Docker. For workspace management, neither Flatpak nor package managers provide much in terms of management features.
Silverblue has some nice tricks for workstations (i.e. background updates, non-volatile system partitions, easy upgrades+rollbacks) but I’m not sure how much management a normal Linux install requires in the first place. Very few Linux distros are written so they can be managed effectively by sysadmins.
I’m the author of the blog post and a former sysadmin, there’s really no maintenance to do with flatpaks, not having to deal with traditional package manager issues have removed that problem completely from my life.
Distros may or may not provide this functionality, but on my systems they’re set up for zero maintenance of the OS base image and the flatpaks via service units and then I don’t have to do anything.
My premise is that sysadmin/user time is more expensive than drive space. Seeing some real world examples of how Flatpak could save time over the long run would probably be beneficial for increasing usage.
Keep in mind I have no dog in this fight, I don’t have a preference of one over the other. I only made that comment because everytime I see a Flatpak reference on the web it’s always in the context of disk usage.
I don’t think many sysadmins will be dealing with Flatpak. For server solutions, there’s Docker. For workspace management, neither Flatpak nor package managers provide much in terms of management features.
Silverblue has some nice tricks for workstations (i.e. background updates, non-volatile system partitions, easy upgrades+rollbacks) but I’m not sure how much management a normal Linux install requires in the first place. Very few Linux distros are written so they can be managed effectively by sysadmins.
If I was running business workstations on Linux, I’d probably prefer Flatpak over distro specific package managers most of the time.
I’m the author of the blog post and a former sysadmin, there’s really no maintenance to do with flatpaks, not having to deal with traditional package manager issues have removed that problem completely from my life.
Distros may or may not provide this functionality, but on my systems they’re set up for zero maintenance of the OS base image and the flatpaks via service units and then I don’t have to do anything.