this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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Nix has a great potential as a replacement for flatpak actually as it is source based. You can guarantee what you are installing is based on which source code by compiling yourself.
Flatpak and the others are packaged by upstream. A developer can put malware in a package and upload it to flathub. That's why it needs permission management, sandboxing etc to minimize the risk.
I like the sandboxing of flatpak not just because of malware but also for proprietary software. But I guess the same could be achieved with Nix + Bubblewrap.
Also the flatpak runtimes are insane to me, atleast the big platforms like "org.gnome.platform". That thing weighs a nice 800mb and is pretty much a full linux install. And while in theory these should be share between programs, you can end up unlucky and have five massive runtimes for 5 different programs (like when i was trying some flatpak programs the other day). That's a nice 4GB of overhead and programs STILL include their own libraries if they are missing in the runtimes...might as well go the windows approach.
Haha yeah. Flatpak is pretty much like having 2 linux systems on your machine at once. And of course it can be worse sometimes.