I know many hate the flatpaks and such, but for the past 2 weeks I got to see their advantage. Yes thety take up a lot of space, but when Blanket didn't work, I quickly searched for why is that and found out that an update to some packages (libraries) it depends on, was breaking the app. I use that app a lot to put some ambient noise when I sleep - helps me sleep well :). I use TROMjaro (Arch) so I get access to some newer packages/libraries. But well, one update to one library destroyed one app. I then decided to install the flatpak version of Blanket and all worked wonders.
I also use Shotwell as my Photo library. Indexes over 20k photos and 1k videos of mine. It does the best job out of all image gallery apps. My photos are a mess on my drive, in lots of folders with weird names. So I really need Shotwell to organize them by dates and such. Else I can't touch my photos/videos. But Shotwell stopped working days ago. Opened an issue with the devs and we realized is gstreamer (another package) that's at fault. What can I do about that? Complain to gstreamer....will take a while to debug it probably. But well, I installed the flatpak version and all works perfectly fine.
So my sleep and my photos/videos all work now thanks to flatpaks. They come with all of the dependencies bundled so you can be sure they work. Maybe this is the way forward....it sure is easy to install and update them (any mother can do it) + a lot more reliable...
So yah, I am glad TROMjaro comes with flatpak support out of the box. #tromlive
Wu Wei :xfce: :rss: :terminal: likes this.
Rokosun
in reply to Tio • •@Tio
For me flatpak is more like a bandage than anything else, sure it might be helpful in situations like these, but its never a complete long term solution. All of these problems you described happened because of dependency errors, I usually downgrade that dependency to make things work until the devs figure it out and release a new update that works.
Instead of changing the program to work on the user's machine, flatpak changes the user's machine to make the program work ! This is what flatpak does in a nutshell. it sure makes things easy for the devs, but I think an optimal solution here would be to have a better system for detecting dependency errors and maybe provide an easy method for users to downgrade packages if something goes wrong.
Tio
in reply to Rokosun • •Sure I could have done that but that will probably result in other broken packages that depend on that one.