Packaging formats and their use in Zorin OS

[zenzen]

@anon2532484

because it [Flatpak] is currently the most reliable and fleshed-out experience there is for apps on Linux.

Flatpak's sandbox environment is something most people unfamiliar with Linux don't know about. For a distribution such as ZorinOS, aimed at this particular audience, this has a massive impact. You can take a look at the amount of issues raised in this forum that are caused by this exact reason (packages installed as Flatpak by default). Sometimes this isn't a problem, depending on the package itself, and the specific use case. This hit-or-miss situation is the opposite of reliable.

@anon2532484

However, because Flatpak can also deduplicate it's own dependencies this only really applies if you have a small amount of Flatpaks installed. Especially as your library grows there is barely a space usage difference compared to apt.

This is technically true, with a twist. After a while you might end up with packages that require different runtime environments e.g.: Gnome 43, Gnome 44, Gnome 45, etc. that need to be installed and maintained separately. This in turns results in double, triple or even quadrupled the amount of dependencies needed.
What's more, Flatpaks that have an update available but that depend on different runtime version will not be automatically updated: you need to manually uninstall and then re-install to the newer version.

@anon2532484

Having to restart your system to update the browser [firefox] is silly, and could impact security negatively as there is significantly more downtime to ensuring your Web Browser's security.

I don't know about the security claim on this sentence and in fact I'd like to know more, but restarting the system after a Firefox update is completely untrue.

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EDIT:

In the second screenshot of this post you can see what I mean about quadruplicating dependencies (note the multiple gnome platform versions)

Why does a program (HomeBank) I'm actively using not show as 'installed' or able to run from command line?

The software store has access to other types of format packages in addition to the well known .deb packages, known as Flatpak and Snap. From your description of the issue, it sounds like you've installed one of these formats and in fact the flatpak option is selected by default. [sc1] You can list packages installed from Flathub (the "store" of Flatpaks) with the command flatpak list, which will also show you the executable which you can input to the terminal to launch it. With Flatpaks this …

And the huge size difference:

What extensions are you using?

Thanks a lot! I'll play with this and see what I can come up with... Also, for comparison, the massive difference in size of flatpak vs .deb packages [flatpak_vs_deb]