A few years ago we were able to upgrade everything (OS and Apps) using a single command. I remember this was something we boasted about when talking to Windows and Mac fans. It was such an amazing feature. Something that users of proprietary systems hadn’t even heard about. We had this on desktops before things like Apple’s App Store and Play Store were a thing.
We can no longer do that thanks to Flatpaks and Snaps as well as AppImages.
Recently i upgraded my Fedora system. I few days later i found out i was runnig some older apps since they were Flatpaks (i had completely forgotten how I installed bitwarden for instance.)
Do you miss the old system too?
Is it possible to bring back that experience? A unified, reliable CLI solution to make sure EVERYTHING is up to date?
alias update='sudo pacman -Syu && flatpak update'or just use one of the trillion GUI app stores like pamac, discover, or gnome’s thing whatever they call it.just stick to your distro packages man
yeah like other people have rec’d, I just wrote a script for installing/removing/upgrading/searching all the package managers I have. this was used as a tongue in cheek jab and has never truly been a brag.
You don’t really need much of a script, a relatively simple bash alias should do the trick and for new users the GUIs are a better solution anyway and those still update all apps.
I don’t use flatpak. But if your distro does, I imagine it should be pretty easy for them to provide a higher level program that updates both types of packages at once. I think this isn’t a big problem.
Use a distribution with a large package library that is kept up to date and there is noting to miss.
Ubuntu is starting to push Snaps. So, that is becoming an unavoidable reality for Ubuntu users. For the most part though, Flatpaks remain optional for most distros.
The problem that Flatpaks solve is that the distro provided packages are out-of-date. If they are not, there is no real reason to prefer Flatpak.
I do hear that. Flatpaks do not seem to be very good sandboxes though.
I can still do that, because I understood that problem when it arose.
I update all of my flatpaks,
snaps, and dnfs(?) with the click of a button in GNOME Software.Edit: apparently I stopped using snaps at some point. Still, GNOME Software does both my flatpaks and my regular stuff.
100% agree with you OP.
Which is kinda one of the main reasons I started to like and still like gentoo. I do understand that it’s not for everyone as a daily driver. Maybe Arch could also fit?
I use BAUH as a GUI “update everything in one click” does repos, aur, flatpak, snaps, appimages. Paru is CLI option for repo, aur and flatpak. I dunno if it does snaps never checked.
Wait, paru can handle flatpaks?
you could use topgrade to update, and it will generally update with every package manager available.
deleted by creator
The GUIs do that in a even easier way for new users and experienced people can always just add a simple bash alias, a universal command never existed anyway because we have various different package managers on different distros so I don’t see any lost feature whatsoever tbh
I can’t really relate? At least on my desktop. The software manager integrates with Flatpaks and upgrades them at the same time.
For most apps I’m going to prefer the usual way of doing things. But there are some apps that I actually kinda prefer as Flatpaks. Like Calibre I’m happy to install as a Flatpak. The updates are faster and it doesn’t add a whole host of dependencies that only it uses to my system.
Everything was simple and straightforward except for updating an app after new release before the distro maintainers updated it in repos (which often took months).
And broke all the time, and was a nightmare for devs to create and maintain packages for multiple distros, and was hard to find packages outside the official repos, and could create a package version hell, and had only a very rudimentary permission system.
Change is sometimes not a bad thing, you know?!
This is why I really like KDE Plasma’s discover. It’s got integrations with apt, snap, Flatpack, and rpm, and that’s only the ones I’ve tried so far.
I don’t really use discover itself to manage my packages, cause for some reason I prefer to do it with the cli tools, but it is a great update notifier.
