this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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That's not all that different than a traditional package manager. You're downloading the dependencies either way. With Flatpak, they're bundled in. With a traditional package manager, it just fetches all the dependencies and shows you that they're being installed one-by-one. Either way, it's one command to install.
You're correct that Flatpak solves that problem, and there's some value there. But you can also solve the problem by just having two versions of Python or two version of libjpeg or whatever installed, and then you as the user/admin manages ensuring that each program uses its correct dependency. That's certainly more difficult, but I've just not found it to be problem that is both frequent enough and difficult enough to solve that I would personally value the tradeoff in overall complexity of adding Flatpak to the way I manage and use my systems.