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Comment by udev4096 | Hacker News Reader

> Bazzite, was a better experience than SteamOS

Bazzite is so much worse than SteamOS in terms of usability. I installed it on my deck and it was full of bugs, the ISO image size is the biggest I have ever seen (~10G), KDE crashes way too often, invoking keyboard doesn't work half the time, comes with so much bloat (waydroid being one of them). It's a joke to even call it a better "experience".

Also, immutability absolutely sucks for daily drive. I have to wait for 10mins for rpm-ostree to install a package while a normal distro can do it in seconds. Immutability makes sense in case of routers, VMs running core services (such as a reverse proxy, dns, etc)

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> Also, immutability absolutely sucks for daily drive. I have to wait for 10mins for rpm-ostree to install a package

That's not a problem with immutability in general... rpm-ostree is just horrendously slow. On nixos I can install a new package in a few seconds and start using it without a reboot.

(I used Silverblue for a bit before switching to NixOS so I know your pain)

The idea is that you do not install packages, at all. Instead, you would use Flatpak and the like, plus mutable containers (Distrobox or whatever) if needed.

This. Installing packages via rpm-ostree is something one can do, but in most cases it should not be necessary. It's more of an escape hatch than an everyday tool. Most additional software will be installed in the user's home directory.

Flatpak wants to download a gazillion dependencies before the actual package. And even the original package size is huge, compared to apk, deb, rpm, etc. Stop with the bloat. Native package managers are always going to be fast, easy to use and have a minimal size

> Flatpak wants to download a gazillion dependencies before the actual package

Ah yes unlike other package managers that magically make applications not need dependencies.

I know this was sarcasm, but my experience is that I download much less with Debian's APT than I did with Flatpak.

I can think of two explanations: (1) Debian packages have more shared parts, and (2) they have optional dependencies ("recommends" and "suggests") which I disable by default. Because of (1), there will be many library packages to download, but the overall volume is reduced.

Standard Debian packages share their dependencies. Every Flatpak package is a special snowflake with its own dependencies. That's the point of it. But it makes download and install sizes enormous.

Flatpaks also share dependencies. Usually not quite as much as distro-specific packages, but it's wrong to suggest that each Flatpak ships all dependencies separately.

> Native package managers are always going to be fast, easy to use and have a minimal size

They become necessary when you are dealing with Windows style "applications" that drag in enormous amounts of dependency. I had Libreoffice fall over on Void Linux because of some JVM issue. You think I want to debug a JVM issue in 2020-something to type some text? No thanks - flatpak.

The uBlue fellas do make it a point in their docs, OSTree is a last resource install method, Flatpaks first, (or Brew for CLI), Other types of container second, last OSTree

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