this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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A few years ago we were able to upgrade everything (OS and Apps) using a single command. I remember this was something we boasted about when talking to Windows and Mac fans. It was such an amazing feature. Something that users of proprietary systems hadn't even heard about. We had this on desktops before things like Apple's App Store and Play Store were a thing.

We can no longer do that thanks to Flatpaks and Snaps as well as AppImages.

Recently i upgraded my Fedora system. I few days later i found out i was runnig some older apps since they were Flatpaks (i had completely forgotten how I installed bitwarden for instance.)

Do you miss the old system too?

Is it possible to bring back that experience? A unified, reliable CLI solution to make sure EVERYTHING is up to date?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

On Arch Linux I've migrated away from Flatpaks, so I only use AUR and official repos.

Oh boy my updates speed increased like 3 to 5 times. Flatpak is slow as fuck.

Also my ISP is slow as fuck.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

No. (Or maybe yes. See Edit)

Ultimately, you are the one that decided to install things outside of your distro's package manager. If you don't like what happens as a result... then don't do that.

You are completely able to use the built-in package manager to achieve what we had "a few years ago". If you want something that isn't available in the package manager you can do what we did "a few years ago" and install it separately yourself (from source, flatpaks, snaps, appimage). Or you could become a package maintainer for that package and get it added as a package for your distro. It's completely up to you and in no way different frmo what it was a few years ago.

Edit: after finding out from @[email protected] that Fedora does in fact officially support Flatpak, I do indeed think that they could do better in how they support that.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

On Mint everything updates automatically for me, Flatpaks and all.

[–] zacher_glachl 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

No need to overcomplicate things, just write a small shell script or even just an alias. I use this daily:

alias get-rekt="sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y && sudo apt autoremove -y && flatpak update -y && flatpak remove --unused --delete-data -y"

adjust accordingly for Fedora and/or snaps. Obviously doesn't work for appimages or manually compiled stuff which should be a last resort if there's no other sensible way to install stuff.

edit: voyager shat the bed with the code block but you get the point

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

you could use topgrade to update, and it will generally update with every package manager available.

[–] RIotingPacifist 5 points 1 year ago

flatpaks are all updated at once, just like distro packages, so yeah you might need to commands, but that's still very different to having each application update itself (and the security hell implied by that)

Also I think pkcon can manage your updates across various backends (unless you are on Arch, where I think there are both technical & ideological objections to having a simple tool that just works)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

To still sorta replicate that, I just set up a script at /usr/local/bin/update for it:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

sudo emaint sync -a &&
sudo emerge -utDU @world &&
sudo emerge -c;
flatpak --user update;
doom upgrade &&
doom sync &&
doom purge
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is why I really like KDE Plasma's discover. It's got integrations with apt, snap, Flatpack, and rpm, and that's only the ones I've tried so far.

I don't really use discover itself to manage my packages, cause for some reason I prefer to do it with the cli tools, but it is a great update notifier.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Except it doesn't always work. I've seen it stuck and loading updates forever a few times, while a simple flatpak update command did the job with zero issues.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, that's Fedora, my friend. On Gentoo it's still the same.

[–] Chobbes 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah, as a NixOS user I was like "what?"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is one of the reasons i don't use flatpaks, snaps etc. I get everything either from the official repos or from the aur. Except balena etcher as it is the only thing i was unable to install via my aur helper and i couldn't be bothered to look into why as balena is not that important to me.

It is the ONLY package that isn't updated with my update command as i installed it via appimage

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[–] archy 3 points 1 year ago

I use one command to upgrade the whole system: paru one one system and yay on the other laptop.

[–] rsolva 3 points 1 year ago

Fedora updates flatpaks automatically, system updates too, but you need to reboot. Which Fedora version do you use?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

100% agree with you OP.

[–] stewie3128 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

emerge -uDN @world

...and head to bed for me.

[–] sugartits 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And wake up and find the third package in failed to compile.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I mostly stick to things in the repos, if theres something I want that's not yet packaged I package it myself because Gentoo packages are fancy bash scripts with libraries (eclasses) to handle the normal make && make install sort of things for most build systems

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