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Summary: Today we revisit packaging and distribution the "container" way (bloat, blob, not even a new concept as these used to be dubbed "appliances", not "apps"); the general verdict is that Fatpacks/Flatpaks are a GNOME/Red Hat (now IBM, but this predates the takeover bid by a couple of years) power play if not vendor lock-in by centralisation and standard-setting. Efficiency isn't among the goals and it is often falsely marketed.

THE Flatpak (Fatpack) way of doing things is troublesome for technical reasons, set aside ethical and legal reasons. Aside from infighting over Snap and Flatpak (AppImages are another kind of monster) there are some downsides as we noted here in the distant past [1, 2].

Nevertheless, there are now whole distros, not IBM's by the way (not Fedora derivatives either), that adopted Flatpak as a default option (see "The Top 8 Linux Distros That Have Adopted Flatpak").

To avoid repeating what we covered here before or what's said in the video above, let's just say that Flatpaks do have their merit in some scenarios. However, one must recognise the downsides too. Like with Snap or even with AppImages, there are bloated background processes running all the time 'in the mist' (more than abstraction layers), taking up RAM and CPU on any distribution laden with the bloat loader. In terms of performance, it's a regression. it is a step back.

"Like with Snap or even with AppImages, there are bloated background processes running all the time 'in the mist' (more than abstraction layers), taking up RAM and CPU on any distribution laden with the bloat loader."Red Hat's Flatpak went though a number of name changes, as history tells, but the final name should have been Fatpack. It's not a community project ("Fedora") but part of a Red hat ambition, coinciding with ambitions like sigStore. It's about centralisation. domination, and bloat, even domination over distros that aren't Red Hat's own. Canonical worked towards a similar thing at about the same time and both help shoehorn proprietary software into people's machines.

"There's been a huge increase in articles pushing proprietary "docker" approaches to problems," an associate told us this week. "There are a lot of problems that Flatpak claims to solve but no one addresses the wasted space caused by statically linking endless dependencies for each application again and again. Nor do any [...] approach the problem that it is mainly intended to carry a proprietary payload."

Well, they say Flatpak is good for developers, not necessarily users. They say it makes life easier, but that's sort of missing the point if it ends up replacing Free with proprietary. "For Flatpak," the associate explained, "dig up the description of it or try a Flatpak-based distro on a spare machine. Flatpak is an attempt to foist packaging off onto the developers which will result in an actual reduction in time spent doing actual development. Distros do the packaging and the developers can focus on writing the program. Flatpak can continue that route but the "selling point" is that somehow the developers are going to be so eager that they'll fall all over themselves to stop developing and spend their time packaging -- for free -- for IBM."

"While I don't oppose large blobs in some rare scenarios, making it the "new normal" would be an error.""Most developers hate administrivia. Packaging is a low-skilled activity, to boot, so it is a very good entry-level position for those who wish to begin participating in a distro or development in general. What the Flatpak fiasco is hiding is that those beginners are trying up as there are no colleges or universities where kids can learn computing any more. So every year, as people die and retire, there are fewer in absolute numbers because even basic replacement levels are not being reached."

"IBM has also driven away and dispersed a massive established community of volunteers. So this Flatpak is just a smoke screen. Seriously, given the change in IBM towards being strongly anti-Linux and anti-FOSS one can wonder if the Flatpak move is simply an attack on the time and morale of the remaining application developers. That IBM effectively disbanded the Fedora community plays into this problem. Flatpak is in itself a distro -- but one for proprietary packages."

Calling it Fatpak "would be accurate," the associate adds, "since a normal desktop quickly bloats to tens of gigabytes on the HD once you add a couple of applications. [...] Snaps are even worse..."

My own personal experience and perspective is covered in the video above. While I don't oppose large blobs in some rare scenarios, making it the "new normal" would be an error. ⬆