 Way back when I was an arch user. I was a very big supporter of the a you are in fact I'd go so far as to say I was a fan boy of the you are I made a lot of videos over the course of two years Where I talked about how awesome the a you are was and how everyone should use an arch based distro because the a you Are was so good and as you can tell by the tone of my voice. I was very Well, I did it a lot. Let's just put it that way. I Bored people to death with my fandom of the a you are Now since then I've switched to fedora and now I bore people with how awesome fedora is, you know I consider fedora the best distro, but it's the best distro for me and we're not here to talk about how awesome fedora is even though I could go on about it for 20 minutes and Nobody wants to hear that anymore because I've made that video already But anyways, the point is is that one of the reasons why my transition from arch to fedora Was so smooth was because of flat packs now. I've made Videos about flat packs before and I've talked about the benefits. I've talked about the downsides and at the time of my last video I was very agnostic towards them. I was Well, let's just say I was pretty sure that they were the best Cross-platform package management system out there. I was arguing that but I wasn't so high on them that I was You know Thinking that they were the next best thing, right? But as I've used fedora more over the last say few months I have come to realize that flat packs are better than I thought that they were so what I wanted to do today was talk about a few reasons why I think flat packs are Absolutely fantastic in that you should give them a try now one of the reasons why I mentioned they are is because a lot of people who use arch watch this channel and Those guys I love all of you you all love the a you are the vast majority of you love the a you are and you have good reason They you are is very very good and it is a platform Benefit for arch Linux like it's it's kind of like iMessage for for iPhone right once you've started using iMessage It's really kind of hard to transition away Not only because other platforms don't have iMessage, but also because Apple kind of you know Change you down and keeps you there and the a you are is kind of like that only in an open source way, right? You use it and it's so good. It's really hard to move away But I think flat packs do a really good job of filling the gap of the a you are now Obviously, there's not as many Libraries and all the development stuff that you'd find in the a you are on flat packs flat packs are for binaries basically only and You're only gonna find Applications on there, so you're not gonna find all the other stuff that you'd find in the a you are but when it comes to actual Applications, I think that the flat packs do a fairly good job of filling in the gap And that's one of the reasons why my transition has been so smooth So let's go ahead and talk about the reasons why I think flat packs are so good So the first one and this is a big one when you download a flat pack on one computer and you download it on another computer You're going to have the exact same experience and this is not true Basically for any other package management system So if you were to run two different versions of Debian, let's say you're running Debbie on both computers But you may have access to different versions of the software if you download from the repos, right? that's something that happens all the time and Also, if for example, you are running Arch on one distro Ubuntu on another one and you download Say OBS from those repositories You're going to get different versions on both of them and different features So if you download the OBS version from Arch, let's say they package it differently than Ubuntu does You know and that causes your experience in those applications to be completely different even though they're technically the same application When you download the flat pack version of that particular piece of software, you're downloading the same version on all your Computers and they'll work exactly the same. They're the exact same version And it is just it's so nice to know that when I download OBS on this computer and I download OBS on my new laptop I'm going to get the exact same experience now I don't think that this is going to be one of those things that apply to everybody because not everybody has multiple computers Not everyone runs multiple distributions all the time So if you don't move around from computer to computer to distro to distro Maybe this benefit isn't as beneficial for you But for me personally, I love the fact that I can download an application on this computer Download an application on the computer behind me and they run exactly the same. It's really nice Now I know that there are going to be the app image guys out there that says well This is the chief benefit of app image. Well, that's probably true But app images have other problems which I've talked about before but we don't need to get into so just know that I know app images have the same kind of thing snaps also kind of do the exact same thing So this is not a flat pack only benefit, but I use and prefer flat pack So this is one of the reasons why I like flat pack so much another reason is very minor And it's gonna seem very silly but flat packs don't require you to use pseudo when you install them now This is true whether you install from the GUI or from the command line And if you want to install stuff without pseudo all the time, that's really nice now like I said it seems silly because how long does it take you to enter your password and It is silly, but I like the fact that I can just do flat pack install whatever and installs now the terminal Installation of a flat pack has other problems. So there's a lot of confirmation steps when you install a flat pack I would wish they would combine those so you don't have to press yes three different times So that's one thing. They also still have that really stupid naming convention for flat packs Which they had just really have to get rid of it makes it so confusing Especially like if you were to download or try to download OBS from the terminal through flat flat hub You're gonna get a listing of like 16 different OBS if you do flat pack install OBS, you're gonna get 16 options and you have to go searching through calm dot OBS studio dot studio or that plug-ins slash codecs whatever, you know There's like 16 different ones there and you have to know exactly which one you want and you have to know the naming convention It's not user-friendly at all now Obviously, you don't have this problem in a GUI you just download OBS and it works But if you're using the terminal version, it's not user-friendly at all So I wish they'd fixed that but outside of that I like the fact that you don't have to use pseudo It just saves me a little bit of time and like said, it's a silly reason But I like it another reason that I like flat packs is that they you almost almost Universally store all of their data in one place now if you download applications from your distros repo You'll know that developers put their stuff all over the place They're like a teenager in their room and they have their stuff scattered all over the place They put things in the home directory. They put things in that config things are in dot local that share things are, you know In all over the place like I said, you just you'd never know where an application is going to store their stuff with a flat pack Almost certainly all the data for a application is going to be in the dot var directory inside of your home directory Now I said almost certainly because there are some instances where Once you give a application access to your the rest of your user files That usually gives them permission to then move their data in other places and that's always annoying But if your flat pack stays contained chances are most of the data is going to be in that directory and What reason why this is good is because when you do decide to hop to a new distro or move to a different computer You can take that dot var directory Transfer it to your new distro or your new computer and all of your data from all your flat packs are right there And they'll pick up right where they left off, which is really it's it's nice Because you don't have to keep track of all those separate Directories and stuff that are all over the place if you want to back up your data from your applications Which is something you probably should do so the last reason on my list is that flat packs are becoming increasingly more popular As time goes on more and more developers more and more companies are choosing to make flat packs their official version There are several examples of this OBS being the biggest one where if you want to download their application Flat pack is probably the best way to do so probably through flat hub And the reason why this is great is because if you like flat pack and you enjoy the benefits of using flat pack it's nice to have the official version of the application that you download and Obviously they do probably supply their application through other sources But if you are already using flat pack knowing that the version that you're downloading is the official version That's just a kind of it's like the icing on the cake It just makes it so much better and OBS is by far the best example of this And they've done such a nice job of packaging OBS in a way That just works and you know that when the new stuff comes out the new version comes out You're going to get it first Whereas if you're relying on like the snap package, you're going to have to wait for whoever maintains the snap package to update the snap package and If you're waiting for the app image, you're gonna have to wait the same time if you're waiting for the you are you're gonna have to wait for that to be updated and Also because the main the developer of OBS is the same one that maintains the flat pack You're not gonna have to deal with any weird Choices when it comes to packaging OBS So you're not gonna have to deal with them taking out features because OBS has control over it So that is another really good reason to use flat packs now. Like I said, I'm not Blind to flat packs problems. They still have despite the fact that they're supposed to be containerized They still are not the integration between the security layer that you're supposed to have control over and flat pack itself Isn't all that great. You have to have a special application to control the security of the flat packs called flat seal Flat seal really should be a dependency of flat pack. It really really should you shouldn't have to go have to download it in order to Control all the permissions and stuff of your flat packs. So that's still an issue so it's not the biggest Reason why you'd want to use flat packs is probably because of the containerization features and I'm not convinced that flat packs are as sandboxed as we'd like them to be a lot of Applications come pre-installed with permissions that you don't necessarily think that they need and some of them come with no Permissions at all that they do need so the permissions Aspect of flat packs is still something that they need to work on significantly putting flat seal as a dependency for flat pack would be the first step that I'd have them take But outside of that, you know, it's not an easy question or an easy thing for them to do, right? You can't proclaim yourself sandboxed and secure while not being consistent across the board and that's something that they still struggle with and Part of the reason why is because it's a very open structure, right people. There's no True way to say everyone has to do things exactly this way and And That can become a problem because then everybody's doing something a little bit different and it just it doesn't quite work as well As you'd hope it would considering the flat packs are supposed to be a you know a sandbox system So those are the reasons why I really like flat packs and one of the reasons why my transition from arch to Fedora has gone so smoothly because I've been able to find the vast majority of my applications and just download them Through flat packs and the experience has just been so good. It's just one of those things that it's made it so I Don't even think about my the lack of a you are on on my system anymore I mean every once in a while I'll come across something that I have to install for the terminal that I missed the you are for but when it comes to Like gooey applications almost everything is available through flat hub these days and it's just it's really good So if you are on the fence over choosing between snaps flat packs app images I highly recommend choosing flat packs. It just seems to be the best one out of the three So for those of you who use they you are you're probably going to just completely ignore this video and continuing to use they you are As you probably should because they you are still is really really good And there's still nothing that can truly compete compete with it because it does So much more than just applications So that is it for this video if you have thoughts on flat packs You can leave those in the comment section below you can follow me and mess it on our odyssey those links to be in the video Description you can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash the link cast links for YouTube and the bear pay will be in the video Description thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon YouTube because they're all Absolutely amazing without you the channel just not be anywhere near where it is right now So thank you so very very very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it I probably could add a few more varied in there, but there'd never be enough to to express my gratitude So thank you so much. Thank you so much for your support again. I appreciate it. Thanks everybody for watching I'll see you next time a little bit of a ramble there at the end there Matt. Good job