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I can't really comment about snap since I don't use Ubuntu but I thought flatpaks would work similar to how portable apps on windows do. Clearly I'm wrong, but how is it that windows can have portable apps of a similar size to their installable versions and Linux cannot? I know I'm missing something fundamental here, like how people blame Linux for lack of hardware support without acknowledging that hardware vendors do the work for windows to work correctly.

Either way disk space is cheap and abundant now. If I need thenlastest version of something I will use flatpaks.

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Just a guess, but Windows executables probably depend on a bunch of Windows APIs that are guaranteed to be there, while Linux systems are much more modular and do not have a common, let alone stable ABI interface in the userspace. You can probably get small graphically capable binaries if you depend on QT and just assume it to be present, but Flatpak precisely does not do that and bundles all the dependencies to be independent from shared dependencies of the OS outside of its control. The article also mentions that AppImages can be smaller probably because they assume some common dependencies to be present.

And of course there are also tons of huge Windows software that come with all sorts of their own dependencies.

Edit: I think I somewhat misread your comment and progval is more spot on. On Linux you usually install software with a package manager that resolves dependencies and only installs the unsatisfied dependencies resulting in small install size for many cases while on Windows that is not really a thing and installers just package all the dependencies they cannot expect to be present and the portable version just does the same.

The equivalent of "Windows portable apps" on Linux isn't flatpaks (these add a bunch of extra stuff and need some sort of support from the OS) but AppImages[0]. AppImages are still not 100% the same (and can never be as Windows applications can rely on A LOT more stuff to be there than Linux desktop apps) but functionally/UX-wise they're the closest: you download some program, chmod +x it and run it like any other binary you'd have on your PC.

Personally i vastly prefer AppImages to flatpaks (in fact i do not use flatpaks at all, i'd rather build the program from source - or not use it if the build process is too convoluted - instead).

[0] https://appimage.org/

Looking at their architecture they seem to be a pain to run safely (sandboxed). For example, you cannot take away access to mount syscall due to them mounting themselves using FUSE.

Also are they easy to debug? Do they ship with debugging symbols? Googling around shows that it might be tricky.

It's a matter of standardization and ABI stability. Linux itself promises an eternally stable syscall ABI, but everything else around it changes constantly. Windows is basically the opposite: no public syscall ABI, but you can always get a window on screen by linking USER.dll and poking it with the correct structures. As a result, Windows apps can assume more, while desktop Linux apps have to ship more.

Linux is moving to Windows model, by shipping userspace libraries. For example, ALSA has a library, DRM has a library.

"Portable" apps on Windows just don't write into the registry or save state in a system directory. They can still assume every Windows DLL since the beginning of time will be there.

Versus Linux where you have Gnome vs. KDE vs. Other and there's less emphasis on backwards compatibility and more on minimalism, so they need to package a lot more dependencies (potentially).

If you only install Gnome Flatpaks they end up smaller since they can share a bunch of components.

Installable versions of Windows apps still bundle most of the libraries like portable apps do, because Windows does not have a package manager to install them.

Windows does have a package manager and has for the last 5 years.

Apart from the Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime, there's not much in the way of third-party dependencies that you as a developer would want to pull in from there. Winget is great for installing lots of self-contained software that you as an end user want to keep up to date. But it doesn't really provide a curated ecosystem of compatible dependencies in the way that the usual Linux distribution does.

Ok but that’s a different argument to “windows doesn’t have a package manager”

No, this is directly relevant to the comparison, especially since the original context of this discussion is about how Windows portable apps are no bigger than their locally installed counterparts.

A typical Linux package manager provides applications and libraries. It is very common for a single package install with yum/dnf, apt, pacman, etc. to pull in dozens of dependencies, many of which are shared with other applications. Whereas, a single package install on Windows through winget almost never pulls in any other packages. This is because Windows applications are almost always distributed in self-contained format; the aforementioned MSVCRT is a notable exception, though it's typically bundled as part of the installer.

So yes, Windows has a package manager, and it's great for what it does, but it's very different from a Linux package manager in practice. The distinction doesn't really matter to end users, but it does to developers, and it has a direct effect on package sizes. I don't think this situation is going to change much even as winget matures. Linux distributions carefully manage their packages, while Microsoft doesn't (and probably shouldn't).

I never said that WinGet was a drop in replacement for yum - but the parents claim that windows doesn’t have a package manager isn’t true.

There are plenty of padkages that require you to add extra sources to your package manager, that are not maintained by the distro. Docker [0] has official instructions to install via their package source. WinGet allows third party sources, so there’s no reason you can’t use it. It natively supports dependencies too. The fact that applications are packaged in a way that doesn’t utilise this for WinGet is true - but again, I was responding to the claim that windows doesn’t have a package manager.

[0] https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/fedora/#install-using...

> I never said that WinGet was a drop in replacement for yum - but the parents claim that windows doesn’t have a package manager isn’t true.

Context matters. They were talking about a type of package manager.

But even without caring about context, the sentence was not "Windows does not have a package manager". The sentence ended with "Windows does not have a package manager to install them" and "them" refers to things that winget generally does not have.

Not as understood by users of every other operating system, even macOS. It's more of an "application manager". Microsoft has a history of developing something and reusing the well-understood term to mean something completely different.

Assuming you're talking about winget, that seems to operate either as an alternative CLI interface to the MS store with a separate database developers would need to add their manifests to, or to download and run normal installers in silent mode. For example if you do winget show "adobe acrobat reader (64-bit) you can see what it will grab. It's a far cry from how most linux package managers operate

Windows 2020 - Welcome to Linux 1999 where the distro has a package manager that has just about everything most users will ever need as options to install from the web.

I can say the same thing about Linux - it’s 2025 and multi monitor, Bluetooth and WiFi support still doesn’t work.

Er, yes they do? I guess things could be spotty if you don't have drivers (which... is true of any OS), but IME that's rare. But I have to ask because I keep hearing variations of this: What exactly is wrong with */Linux handling of multi-monitor? The worst I think I've ever had with it is having to go to the relevant settings screen and tell it how my monitors are laid out and hitting apply.

>I guess things could be spotty if you don’t have drivers

Sure, and this unfortunately isn’t uncommon.

> What exactly is wrong with */Linux handling of multi-monitor?

X11’s support for multiple monitors that have mismatched resolutions/refresh rates is… wrong. Wayland improves upon this but doesn’t support g sync with nvidia cards (even in the proprietary drivers) You might say that’s not important to you and that’s fine, but it’s a deal breaker to me.

Maybe they're using a Desktop Environment that poorly expresses support for it?

I have limited a sample size, but xrandr on the command line and GUI tools in KDE Plasma and (not as recently) LXQt (it might have been lxde) work just fine in the laptop + TV or Projector case.

> I have limited a sample size, but xrandr on the command line and GUI tools in KDE Plasma and (not as recently) LXQt (it might have been lxde) work just fine in the laptop + TV or Projector case.

I'm fond of arandr; nice GUI, but also happily saves xrandr scripts once you've done the configuration.

The only thing you can say in the context of the few bleeding edge hardware that isn't supported by Linux is that:

1. The hardware vendors are still not providing support the way they do for windows.

2. The Linux Devs haven't managed to adapt to these new hardwares.

FUD (Fear Uncertainty Doubt).

Every OS has it's quirks, things you might not recall as friction points because they're expected.

I haven't found any notable issues with quality hardware, possibly with some need to verify support in the case of radio transmitter devices. You'd probably have the same issue for E.G. Mac OS X.

As consumers we'd have an easier time if: 1) The main chipset and 'device type ID' had to be printed on the box. 2) Model numbers had to change in a visible way for material changes to the Bill of Materials (any components with other specifications, including different primary chipset control methods). 3) Manufacturers at least tried one flavor of Linux, without non-GPL modules (common firmware blobs are OK) and gave a pass / fail on that.

I don’t think I am spreading FUD. Hardware issues with Linux on non well trodden paths is a well known issue. X11 (still widely used on many distros) has a myriad of problems with multi monitor setups - particularly when resolutions and refresh rates don’t match.

You’re right that the manufacturers could provide better support, but they don’t.

Unfortunately a lot of Windows devs are targeting 10 year old versions.

If you're targeting Windows, you can assume the following things to be present:

- the entirety of Win32 API

- all the Windows Runtime APIs

- .NET Framework 4.7+

This is a lot of functionality. For example, the list above includes four different widget toolkits alone (Win32, WinForms, WPF, WinRT XAML), several libraries to handle networking (including HTTP), USB, 2D and 3D graphics including text rendering, HTML renderer etc.

And all of this has a highly stable ABI, so long as you do everything by the book. COM/WinRT and .NET provide a stable ABI for high-level object-oriented APIs above and beyond what the basic C ABI can offer.

The real problem in Linux is the lack of a stable abi for anything other than the kernels UAPI. Perhaps one day we will standardize enough of the lower layers of Linux and provide real stability. There is definitely a line between packaging all of your dependencies and packaging none of them. We probably want something in the middle, or else perhaps more functionality which is currently provided via shared libraries should be moved behind stable IPC instead.

> Clearly I'm wrong, but how is it that windows can have portable apps of a similar size to their installable versions and Linux cann

They can't depend on many apis existing or at the right version. Linux distros are made from a collection of various third party projects and distros just integrate those. Each of these third party projects has it's own development speed and ABI and API stability policies.

Each distro also has it's own development speed and release policy, which means they might have things that could either be too new or to old. Most distros try to avoid packaging multiple versions of the same project when they can avoid it to ease maintenance as well.

Heck, you can't even guarantee that you have the exact same libc. Most distros use glibc, but there are plenty of systems that use musl.

I'm replying to myself in reply to everyone who replied to me.

Thanks all for the explanations, much appreciated, I thought I was missing something. I really should have known though, Ive been using portable apps for over 20 years on windows and remember.net apps not being considered portable way back when, which are now considered portable since the run time is on all modern windows.

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