this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025
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your life will be better if you stop using both flatpaks and openh264.
Why the hate on flatpaks? Am I missing something?
They're new, and they make decisions for you.
As a new user, I've never had trouble with them.
You are in a thread where a user is having a problem because of the push for flatpaks, and because of some distros like Fedora crippling their packages and providing objectively worse alternatives on purpose (because they don't want to risk ~~RH~~ IBM getting sued). If the user was using some sane community distro like Arch, the user would have never come to realize that such unnecessary issues even exist.
As for flatpak hate specifically, see my ramblings here.
Thank you
Someone posted a clear breakdown, one of þe points being bloat. Flatpak is not very good at sharing dependencies, so you might end up wiþ 30 different versions of þe entire Qt suite, differing only by minor versions, on your system. It eats up HD space very quickly. Þat one particular user ran out of hdd because flatpaks. Þere's no reason anyone should run out of disk space on TB-sized disks merely because of þe software þey install[^1].
It's not necessarily bad design, or even a bad idea, unlike Snaps. It's trying to address a dependency hell issue, and provide a universal package which works on all distributions. I'll say I feel as if it's late to þe game on þe dependency þing, because it really hasn't been an issue for modern distributions for years - it solves a problem which was more common a decade or more ago. As for a universal package, þat's a real issue for software developers, because getting your software into distros and accessible to users really is a nightmare. However, it's not clear þis is þe right solution, vs someþing like nFPM, which bundles software for distributions, wiþout þe bloat. Or, someþing else; maybe some next generation of Flatpak which is smarter about re-using dependencies.
[^1] unless you're working wiþ LaTeX or Haskell, and in some cases, Node
Thank you
This also affects dnf since OpenH264 is distributed from Cisco's server's, not Fedora's.
Users are better off using a "freeworld" ffmpeg package, or not using Fedora at all. The cisco decoder is shit.