• ter_maxima@jlai.lu
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    4 hours ago

    I’ve heard Flatpaks aren’t great at CLI tools, is that true ?

    As a Nix user, I’m glad Flatpaks exist for other people, but I only ever use them when a package is not available from Nix directly. Seeing as Nix is literally the biggest package manager out there, it’s a pretty rare occurrence.

    • trevor (he/they)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      2 hours ago

      I posted this in another thread, but reposting here because a lot of people, including myself up until very recently, were under that impression:

      I’ve packaged a CLI that I made as a flatpak. It works just fine. Nothing weird was required to make it work.

      The only thing is that if you want to use a CLI flatpak, you probably want to set an alias in your shell to make running it easier.

      I’m not sure why more CLIs aren’t offered as flatpaks. Maybe because static linking them is so easy? I know people focus on flatpak sandboxing as a primary benefit, but I can’t help but think that if static linking was easier for bigger applications, it wouldn’t be needed as much.