 In the war between flat pack and snaps, I've argued for at least a year that flat packs have won, right? The vast majority, or at least feels like the vast majority of mainstream distros are using flat packs outside of Ubuntu which uses snaps and will never change. Most distros use flat packs and that's just kind of the package format that they've chosen. It's cross-platform, it's well-maintained, it's well-sand, each package is well-sandboxed. They've started to work on the whole permissions thing with flat seal and that's getting better. Overall, flat packs have become the thing that most people use when they want to use something outside of their traditional package manager and their software repositories. Now, all that being said, what I want to do today is talk about the reason why I'm slowly phasing out my use of flat packs and containerized packages. The reason why that is, and we'll discuss that a little bit more, is because of my favorite new tool, DistroBox. Now, DistroBox has been around for a while, but it's fairly new to me and every single day I like it a little bit more. So, what I want to do today is talk about why flat packs no longer do it for me, but before we do, if you would leave a thumbs up on this video, I'd really appreciate it, it would really help the channel. So, why am I no longer using flat packs? Well, first off, we'll just get the fanboyness out of the way for a little bit and just say that I really like DistroBox and I prefer to use it. That's one of the reasons why I'm no longer using flat packs, but the biggest reason isn't because DistroBox is so good, it's because over the course of the last maybe six to eight months or so, I've noticed a trend where not only are flat packs getting slower, a lot of snaps to launch, but they're also becoming more bloated. And when I say bloated, I mean that the package sizes themselves have gotten out of control, they're really big, and the number of extraneous outside dependency flat packs that they have to download with them has grown as well. So, if you, for example, download Cayden Live, you're not only going to be downloading the Cayden Live flat pack, but also three or four other flat packs along with it to support it. You know, a locale file or flat pack, you'll also have to download probably the GTK one as well, because it tends to download that along with several others. And this happens with a lot of different flat packs that you download. You're going to get the one that you want to download along with several other dependencies that go along with it. Now, color me weird, but I thought the whole idea behind flat pack and all these containerized formats to actually show every little thing you needed in order to run a program inside of the container. But that's not the way flat pack apparently has chosen to go about things. Instead, while it does have, or at least it seems to have most of the dependencies and libraries and stuff like that inside of the container itself, they have support flat packs that go along with them and you have to download these things. And not only are the flat packs themselves becoming slower to load when you actually have them installed, downloading them from Flat Hub has become much more tedious and time consuming as well. And especially this especially gets harder when you update them, right? When you go through and update a flat packet takes forever to do. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that zipper, which is notoriously slow for a package manager, is actually faster than updating flat packs for me at least recently. And that's not just on this machine, but it's on all my machines where I traditionally use some flat packs. So they become really, really slow. They've become bloated. And honestly, they just have really defeated the purpose of what I thought flat packs were meant to do. And all of that aside, I've come across several different flat packs out there that just aren't well maintained. And this is going to sound like a really weird criticism because it's a criticism that can apply to literally every software repository, whether it's containerized or not, that has ever been created. So if you look at the AUR, one of the biggest problems the AUR has is not only is it so big, but because it's so big, there's a lot of orphaned projects in there. There's a lot of orphaned packages in there. Flat pack and Flat Hub suffer from the exact same thing as the AUR, the Debian repositories, the Ubuntu repositories, the OpenSUSE repositories, you get the idea. Because they rely on community maintainers, you're going to find that some of the packages in there just kind of linger behind the upstream of those projects or get abandoned completely. Flat pack is no different. The problem is that a lot of companies have adopted flat pack as their official package to propagate out into the world, right? I'm talking about like OBS. I believe Audacity is actually using as their main way of distributing the Audacity. I might be wrong about that. I know that a lot of people get Audacity through it. And same thing with a lot of the browsers are still are maintained by the browser companies themselves. So a lot of companies have gone and actually started maintaining their own flat packs. However, I found that a lot of them aren't as fastidious at actually keeping those flat packs updated as I would like. And on top of that, sometimes they compile their flat packs in such a way where they don't always have all the features that the ones that come in software repositories do. So for example, the OBS flat pack that is the official OBS that you're supposed to download. That's what the OBS people will tell you that flat pack is the official package for OBS. That does not support Wayland out of the box, or at least it doesn't support it when you're using a window manager. If you're using a desktop environment, it may be different. But for when you're using a window manager like Hyperland or whatever, you have to do some extra steps in order to actually get that thing to work. Now, this is just one example. Several other examples exist. So Audacity has lagged a little bit on FlatHub from where it is and like the AUR. So if you want the more recent features, you have to get the AUR version. Now, I understand that complaining about this means that what I'm wanting is a rolling release distro and all that stuff, right? So I prefer to have the most recent version of my software. And maybe that's just something that I prefer. Not everybody really cares. That's perfectly reasonable. But when you're looking at two different versions of OBS and they have two different feature sets, you have to make a choice, right? And when you add the deficiencies of, for example, OBS when it comes to the flat pack version of it, along with all the other problems that I just mentioned with flat pack, it just has become no longer worth it for me to use flat pack when I actually want to use it. So another thing with the OBS one, just while I'm harping on OBS, if you want to use OBS in Wayland, you have to manage a lot of the permissions in order to get screen sharing to actually work. And you have to do that through FlatSeal. And that's something that has to be done across the board in many different applications that you download through FlatHub or through FlatPack because the way FlatPack is containerized, you have to deal with the permissions. And this is both a good thing and a bad thing, right? It allows you the ability to have a containerized thing that's not infecting your computer and putting files all over willy-nilly. But on the other hand, it also means that out of the box, a lot of things just don't work. So you have to remember that FlatSeal is a thing that get FlatSeal if you don't already have it. Download it, which is another FlatPack that you have to download. It also comes with several other FlatPacks alongside of it. And then you actually have to go into FlatSeal and figure out which one of the 100 different toggles they have that you have to turn on in order to actually get the thing you want to work to work. It's a big mess and it's not something that I want to deal with anymore, especially when we're going to circle around here. Disturbox is so good. So I truly believe, and I've argued this in at least three videos now, and I will continue to make videos in Disturbox because I think it's awesome, I truly believe that Disturbox is the future of package management completely. And really what that means is that traditional package formatting, literally having packaged software repositories like the AUR, like the OpenSUSE repositories, like the Ubuntu repositories, that way that we've been doing it for all these years is going to stick around and is the best way of doing things. But because you're no longer tied to the distro that those repositories are attached to, you can use whatever distro you want, install Disturbox, install the packages that you want, export it from Disturbox and use it on your machine as a native package. That means that you can get whatever version of the package that you want, whatever features of that software that you want, depending on where it's packaged and how it's packaged and all that stuff, all those decisions and you're not tied to Flatpak itself and the decisions that those maintainers have made and you're not tied to the versions that they decide to upload to you when they decide to eventually upload their package. So my decision to leave Flatpak behind primarily lies in the fact that Flatpaks have gotten worse over the course of the last year. It used to be that snaps were like the third place package format out there simply because they were astonishingly slow, they have a proprietary back end or whatever and all this stuff and you know Canonical has done their thing and they have made it slightly better over the course of the last two years or so since the Flatpak of Firefox was released, they have made snaps better. But it was always a third place to Flatpak and regular software repositories because Flatpak at least was so good. It was fast, it had a lot of software, it was easy to do and while it did have its downsides the whole com.spotify.whatever naming scheme that they still freaking use for some reason it had its downsides but it was still so much better than snaps and that's the reason why so many distributions chose to use it and it's the reason why I chose to use it for many years for the course of the last couple of years I should say on specific packages it just made sense to use the containerized version from Flathub because they offered certain features, usually they were updated before everything else and it was just diagnostic but they've gotten worse and I would say that I haven't tried snaps in quite a while since the last time I tried Ubuntu but it feels like snaps and Flatpak have kind of tied right now and they're both kind of just bad. That's just my opinion and Flatpaks for sure have just gotten worse for me over the course of the last year and it's made me look at a different place and because DistroBox is so good, finding my packages in software repositories and whatever distro that I want and then just putting them on my open Susan install through DistroBox is just a better way of going than Flatpak is and it doesn't have any of the downsides. So that's the reason why I'm abandoning Flatpaks, they're just getting worse and I'm not sure exactly what's going on there maybe it's something that has always been going on and I just am now waking up and seeing it but definitely something that I've paid attention to now and I'm no longer interested in using Flatpaks. Now I still do have a couple on my machine but as I go through and replace them they'll no longer be installed on my machine anymore so eventually I'll get to the point where I'm just not using Flatpaks at all. So that's it for this video, if you have thoughts on this whole thing you can leave those in the comment section below I'd love to hear from you, if you haven't already leave a thumbs up on this video, I can't find out where the camera is and it would really help the channel, I really appreciate it. The camera's right there, dummy. Anyways, you can follow me on Massive Honor honestly those links will be in the video description you can support me on Patreon at Patreon.com slash The Linux Cast you can also head on over to the store where you can find a whole bunch of different merchandise hats and t-shirts and hoodies and desk mats and all that sort of stuff you can find that at shop.thelinuxcast.org all that goes right directly to help the channel when you purchase stuff there and get cool merch. 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