Ive just gone to update my flatpak. I now have to download 7 slightly different versions of nvidia drivers. 7 Fucking times the same Nvidia driver. 7. 7 Goddamn times.
And no, I dont want to hear your excuses for this. I dont care if it only downloads 370 Mbs instead of 371.
flatpak remove --unused
And if that doesn’t work, just remove the nvidia drivers that do not match the installed version. It may give you a warning that the package is in use but it shouldn’t be an issue if you (OP) keep the version that matches your driver
Any idea why flatpack doesn’t remove unused (automatically installed) dependencies automatically or at least give a hint, as e.g.
apt
does?mfw
flatpak remove
does not remove flatpakDoes
apt remove
remove apt?
Why are you even using flatpak if its core usecase offends you?
Why are you even using flatpak if its core usecase offends you?
That meme doesnt really work the way you want it to here. I get what you’re going for but that’s one hell of a stretch.
How about you use the native packages then?
7 slightly different versions of nvidia drivers
and then
7 Fucking times the same Nvidia driver
seems inconsistent…
Is it the same driver or is it different? If the drivers are different, then it seems like a good thing? The app using the driver has exactly the version it wants. There shouldn’t be any surprises now in the code because oops this is a slightly different nvidia driver.
The more I learn about flatpaks, the more I wonder what the fuck happened to APT GET that it was necessary to have everything in one package. Apt would grab dependencies, too, if they were necessary the last time I was heavily using Linux. Is that no longer the case?
Flatpak is not just an alternative packaging format. One of the key advantages is that it provides a predictable runtime environment that is independent from the rest of the system. Sometimes an application needs a particular version of a dependency (called dependency pinning, very common practice in development) and can’t rely on the system having the correct files. It also isolates the application from issues stemming from environment variables and the “global” filesystem.
It also gives developers greater control over packaging. Because of this isolation, they don’t have to rely on downstream packagers to manually adapt the software to the distro’s available packages (potentially introducing bugs).
One infamous example is Bottles. The project is officially distributed as flatpak, but OpenSUSE wanted to distribute it as native binaries. They had to use an outdated, broken version and caused a flood of user reports for issues that were not Bottles’ fault. More in this thread and open letter: https://github.com/bottlesdevs/Bottles/pull/3583