Can someone explain why flatpak isn't necessary for distros that have proper OS dependency management like Arch-based distros or Nix?
Seems like flatpak is solving a problem for OS's that don't have proper dependency management.
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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As long as software is available in the Software Manager to be installed that way... I don't care what format it's in.
But don't make normies go to the terminal. It's inhumane, and really does not help the masses get away from big tech - which is a worthier goal than keeping your software terminal-only.
Flatpaks are awesome. Flathub is awesome. :)
Most of us refugees just want windows but cool.
I'm starting to think that in terms of features and possiblities, nix might truly be the best third party package manager of all. But the downside is that especially when using it the way it's recommended, combined with home manager, it has the steepest learning curve. Also graphical apps can be problematic. There is a tool called nixgl that tries to solve this, but it's a wrapper, so when a nix application opens a child process that needs to use the native system drivers, that childprocess is also wrapped in nixgl and it breaks. I recently found a neat workaround on github to solve this in a better way, which is to create a driver package manually with home manager, and symlink it to /run/, which is also where the drivers are linked on NixOS. This is a gamechanger to me because with no driver problems anymore, you can install almost everything through nix on pretty much any distro, except maybe for some programs that need system level access to run. You can install graphical programs, cli programs, and even entire window managers with it. I'm using full NixOS at the moment, but i'm seriously debating moving back to void linux with nix on top. Currently messing with it in a vm to test my configs.
It's not my fault they make running apps from the cli so irritating. Broken by design. Even snaps work better.
my issue with all of these gui tools ut never forces you to learn the cli to fix things just use guis