Pretty sure the culprit here is Fedora’s packaging which adds an opaque systemd timer to run auto-updates, but the thread immediately next to this one on my homepage just happened to be a nice case-study in Flatpak fuckery: https://lemmy.world/post/30654407

Of course, the proposed changes in the article do nothing to fix this sorta problem, which happens to be the variety that end users actually care about. Flatpak is an epic noob trap since it pretends to be a plug-n-play beginner friendly tool, but causes all sorts of subtle headaches that newcomers inevitably don’t have diagnostic experience to address.

[–] bitcrafter@programming.dev 15 points 4 weeks ago (4 children)

The problem of there being a separate runtime for each video driver version was explicitly discussed in the article:

If you are part of the huge part of the population who happens to own a Nvidia GPU, it's a whole other can of worms. There are Flatpak runtimes that target specific Nvidia driver versions, but they must be matched with a compatible version installed on the host system, and it is not always a process as smooth and painless as one would hope.

An improvement idea that is floating around is to, basically, just take a step back and load the host drivers directly into the runtime, rather than shipping a specific version of the userspace drivers along with the application. Technically, it is possible: Valve's Linux runtime is pretty similar to Flatpak architecturally, and they solved this problem from its inception by using a library called libcapsule to load the natively installed host drivers into the Steam Runtime. This is the reason why it's significantly rarer that an old Steam game fails to launch on a new GPU, compared to the same scenario on Flatpak!

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 1 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I really think if flatpaks were built upon nix, it would resolve these problems. It would however bring a new problem: people would have to learn forsaken nix 💀

[–] bitcrafter@programming.dev 2 points 3 weeks ago

It's not clear that it would, because the root problem is locking a package to a particular version of the nvidia drivers, which nix would not solve. Unless I am missing something?

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