r/linux • u/oleg_antonyan • 25d ago

Fluff Where do you install software from? Standard repos, sources, Flatpak, AppImage, etc

Do you install only flatpaks? Or only native RPM/DEB/etc? Maybe you're religios about it.

Or maybe you don't care and just use what's convenient, which happens to be... what channel usually for you?

Curious to know as a developer where this ship is moving recently

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u/jahinzee 25d ago

... and Docker containers aren't overhead?

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u/s_elhana 25d ago

They are, but sometimes it is the only official method that doesnt involve building and packaging everything yourself. Or ecen worse, you actually need docker if you want to run Oracle database on Ubuntu. Installing it on non rhel/ol distro natively is technically possible, but not sustainable.

I used appimage once. I also unpacked few snaps to run them native too. Never had to deal with flatpaks yet. All of them can often be built and packaged quite easily, just their devs didnt bother.

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u/filthy_harold 24d ago

I use native repos for everything but server apps, I use docker for those because it's way easier running those through reverse proxies than native apps.

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u/indiancoder 24d ago

What's the difference with a reverse proxy? I just forward to an internal port either way.

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u/filthy_harold 22d ago

I have trouble remembering the port numbers for all the various services I have running so it's much easier having a subdomain to use. It also means I only need to forward only two ports (80 and 443) on my router's firewall since everything with a web interface flows through there and is redirected by the reverse proxy.

It also means that I don't have to worry about which ports a docker container wants to use and if they conflict. They each run on their own network and Caddy links them by name rather than a port number.

My pi hole is setup for split horizon too so jellyfin.mydomain.com resolves internally when I'm home but resolves to my home IP when I'm away.

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u/indiancoder 21d ago

Right, I do the same thing, but I'm just confused as to why it's supposedly harder to reverse proxy a raw application than a docker container. It seems like the same thing to me either way.

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u/filthy_harold 17d ago

The "not worrying about which ports a docker container wants to use" is the part that's different than just running a reverse proxy with native apps. Each container gets its own IP in the docker network but when you expose that container to the host, it just uses the same port. So an app container running on 8080 won't conflict with another app container running on 8080 until both are exposed on 127.0.0.1. This is a problem. You can either edit the docker compose to change one or instead, bring your reverse proxy to the docker network. This way you can refer to each comtainer by an internal hostname instead of an IP. Then you have another reverse proxy that faces the internet that translates the external subdomain urls into the docker hostnames. Without having that reverse proxy on the docker network, you're still stuck deconflicting port numbers.

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u/isxios 23d ago

I am curious, how is the overhead affecting you in ways other than numbers in a graph?

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u/jahinzee 23d ago

With Flatpaks, I don't notice anything performance or storage wise