(This is a half-rant half actual question)
I wanted a nice qt theme to use on Scribus since Arc Dark doesn’t work on there. When I tried to install it, pacman said this will install 50 packages. 300 Mb in total.
Why does a theme need packages such as Kauth and Kwallet?
When you’re not telling us which package you’re trying to install in which packaging system, the only meaningful answer is: you’re trying to install the wrong package.
Sorry. I’m using
pacman(default in Arch Linux) and I’m trying to install the breeze qt theme package,breeze.Really, an Arch user who didn’t mention that they’re using Arch, there’s certainly a meme hiding here somewhere!
the original post talks about pacman
but how could we be sure they weren’t talking about the game
it’s one of those packages that are only put in the repo with the intent on being itself a dependency of the full kde desktop, since it’s a component of the deskop and not just a random theme
Exactly. Even on Gentoo, which is parsimonious about dependencies, installing breeze pulls in a good chunk of KDE (although you can get just the icons as a separate package). I imagine it includes window decorations and such which need to be compiled against some of the KDE base code, and that’s pulling in everything else.
I’d suggest qt5ct if you’re trying to set up theming for a few QT5 programs on a non-QT5 desktop. It provides a basic GUI for changing colours/fonts/styles/icons rather than a prepackaged theme that may contain more than you want.
I’d check that you’re actually installing the most appropriate package. For instance on Ubuntu there’s
kid3which is a MP3 tag application that will pull in the entire k desktop environment. Or you can installkid3-qtwhich packages its own version of those dependencies and doesn’t pull an entire desktop environment in if you’re using a non-kde environment.Ubuntu is really bad with this. Installing npm pulls adwaita icon theme, xorg and half the gnome desktop for some reason.
kid3 which is a MP3 tag application that will pull in the entire k desktop environment.
Mental illness. And it seems breeze is the only package which offers the QT theme.
As far as I know the breeze theme is only designed for Plasma, as it depends on some Plasma components to do it correctly.
Breeze is artwork, styles and assets for the Plasma desktop. I have seen this happen with other distributions as well. I couldn’t tell you why it needs all of those extra bits and pieces.
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If it’s packaged right, Breeze is gonna need those 50 dependencies whether it’s in Flatpak or not.
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And what do you get from that?
More bloat from flatpak overhead :^)
The point is, it’s all self-contained within Flatpak, and won’t slow down and pollute your regular package manager when you’re doing updates, or say you want to grep some package or whatever. More importantly, fewer dependencies == lesser chances of things breaking. And because it’s sandboxed, you don’t need to worry too much about having an older library or whatever that’s needed to work. And in case you want to uninstall it, it’s a fairly clean process, whereas uninstalls via your package manager may not always be clean.
flatpak has gtk breeze no the theme for qt apps and in general I don’t see how this would help non flatpak applications which aren’t going to be looking in some flatpak dir for themes.
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I don’t enjoy troubleshooting flatpak specific issues when a native package is available personally. Honestly who cares if it pulls in 50 deps if they take in total a few GB when 2TB ssd are cheap.
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those “hundreds of deps” are part of your flatpak and you will probably be downloading just as much fortunately fast internet is relatively cheap as is storage space and you probably won’t notice if it takes 15 seconds more.
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Normal packaging systems don’t get stuck nor break because you installed more software and its hilarious that you are somehow removing bloat by using a packaging system that calls for you to download the same deps over and over again.
I would use Flatpak more often if I had the money for more storage space :(
If you use Flatpak from the start, the storage thing becomes less of an issue.
Flatpak only takes considerably more space because people use Flatpak as a last resort or too late into the life of the current installation, as flatpak will have too many requirements for too little apps.
It is accurate that the first few flatpaks will use proportionally more storage as you will need more basic resources but you will will always be using substantially more storage than traditional apps. That said storage is cheap and the correct answer is to buy more instead of choosing tech based on storage requirements.
Yes, but the thing is if you are truly limited by storage, you become paranoid about having to remove old and unused software to free space for the ones you wish to use.
Flatpak offers a benefit on some distros, as you are 100% sure any flatpak can be removed without screwing up with your system. So in a very weird way, the storage increase is worth by knowing you can nuke it if necessary.
