Linux

Flatpaks are great. I do wish flatseal was part of the flatpak standard. I want an android style permissions menu

Really awesome. They're all contained within my home directory too, so when I swap distros I can just copy my home dir and all my installed apps are carried over that way. Super useful feature that never gets mentioned! The downside to flatpaks is having to use them for cli in any way is a huge pain.

I always use Flatpaks when available, I have been using it for about 1~2 years and honestly, I haven't found any issues that are deal breakers, mostly some missing storage permissions, but KDE makes this easy to deal with. I know some apps have some issues, but the biggest one that I had is that Steam Flatpak still requires Steam-Devices to be installed as a package, but that's more to do with the way Steam Input works.

The only issue that I have is that uninstalling Flatpaks should present an option to delete the app data.

Don’t like them, they are annoying to deal with - CLI naming is odd, files are stored unintuitively and if your whole system is not on flatpak, chances are the sizes are going to be absurd. One of the main reasons I wen’t with Arch is Pacman + AUR, never have to install a flatpak, because the package management is so good.

Perfection. Debian + GNOME Software + Flatpak = Rock solid and clean OS with the latest software.

There are a few things that still need to be ironed out tho. For eg. communication between desktop apps and browser extensions such as this.

Another thing I would like to see is a decent and supported way to mirror flathub and/or have offline installations.

Never used them, maybe I'm old, but I only use app from the mx/debian repo. Everything is here and up-to-date. I prefer raw native.

I'm using official flatpak Firefox because I didn't want to wait any longer for Fedora releasing their rpm version of it. This way I get new releases right away and they are official as intended by Mozilla.

Not really a flatpak advantage, but a Firefox advantage.

I prefer them. There’s trade-offs (like disk usage and occasional theme issues) but it’s worth it to me for the sandboxing and ability to easily run a newer version of an application than your distro has packaged up in their repos. It’s better for developers since they don’t have to support deb, rpm, etc. etc. And long term, it’ll allow immutable systems to become the default and that’ll be good for security and stability.

Between Snap, Flatpak, and AppImage, I default to Flatpak. It seems like the best supported even if they all have their strengths and weaknesses. AppImage is great for old versions of software you don’t want updated/integrated into menus. Snaps are basically the same and I happily use them if there’s no Flatpak but it’s so tied to Ubuntu/Canonical that some people have opinions about using it. I don’t know of any developer stubbornly refusing to support Flatpak on ideological grounds.

What’s your long-term experience?

Excellent. After uninstalling it never comes back.

I don't like it. Updating dependencies in case of security problems is impossible, I have to wait for the developer to release an update. Also, it wastes a lot of space. Pollutes df output. App startup is slooow.

Just use the native packaging system! There is no reason software can't be released using that.

Seems like every flatpaks update has to redownload Nvidia drivers for each package which is like 500mb, and my download speed is 3mb/s on a good day. So flatpaks limit me to updating once a month

I'm a fan of anything that would make it easier for developers to bring their apps to linux.

ive had supprisingly little issues with flatpaks.

i have been running silverblue for about half a year now, and rely heavily on them.

i can remember 3 distinct issues:

vs code commandlines start in the sandbox, which needs a workarround (rather understandable)

either the fedora, or the flathub build of firefox didnt come with some video codec, OpenH264 i think. switching to the other build fixed it (imo more a licensing issue with the codec than a flatpak problem)

on rare occasions (about once every 3 month)
steam behaves weirdly, and refuses to start until i update the flatpak.

other than that, it has been a smoth ride.

Flatpak is good for chat apps and proprietary apps which you don't want to have full access to your system

My experience with flatpak has been stellar from a technical perspective has been stellar.

Where it currently falls short for me personally is trust. With my distro I am putting my trust into the maintainers, but with flatpak its... random people for most apps?

It is tough when it is not a primary channel of distribution for most devs, but I am optimistic that will change in the future.

It's been great. I can get updated stuff on top of stable point release distro without mixing repos. Offers nice features like sandbox and forcing everything under .var for easy transfer to another machine.

There's some small issues. For some apps fonts look weird but it's fixable. Firefox is so sandboxed that KeepAssXC and KDE Connect/plasme browser integration has harder time with it. Managed to fix XC. Sometimes there's issues with permissions. Well most those things were issues with permissions as in with the sandbox. But I think those issues will be settled at some point.

Flatpaks have been amazing for me.

My home directory is a lot cleaner, dependency issues are a thing of the past, it's easier on the developers, I'm getting updates faster (not having to rely on distro maintainers), my installs are more portable than before.

I wish we had Android-like permission setting, where it pops up asking if each program can use X permission as it requests it.

And I wish Gnome settings would implement some of the more basic flatseal options (flatseal can still exist for power users), although that one isn't a shortcoming of flatpaks itself, it's more to do with development manpower on the Gnome side.

Overall I'm really glad that one of the biggest annoyances in Linux is getting resolved. We've finally pretty much agreed on an app distribution and packaging standard

It's great if the pak meets your needs. For Steam the pak didn't meet my needs because it doesn't allow you to add additional library locations. As long as it's set up in a way that works for you then it's a big time saver.

Aside from philosophical issues my experience with Flatpak has been excellent. There's some theming steps you need to do to make them feel like regular apps, which I feel is clunky design. No Flatpak-induced instability from what I can tell. Setting up directory permissions is sometimes slightly annoying but Flatseal makes it trivial, and most Flatpak permissions are set up properly out of the box these days.

I haven't noticed any start-time delays when launching Flatpaks as opposed to regular apps - I don't know if they've fixed that or if my system is just too powerful. The only app that I've personally noticed is weird is VSCodium, which has trouble escalating to admin permissions when you're trying to edit privileged files. I still use the regular version for that reason.

I am not terribly impressed. The ability to build and run apps in a well defined and portable sandbox environment is nice. But everything else is kind of terrible. Seemingly simple things like having a package that contains multiple binaries aren't properly supported. There are no LTS runtimes, so you'll have to update your packages every couple of months anyway or users will get scary errors due to obsolete runtimes. No way to run a flatpak without installing. Terrible DNS based naming scheme. Dependency resolving requires too much manual intervention. Too much magic behind the scene that makes it hard to tell what is going on (e.g. ostree). No support for dependency other than the three available runtimes and thus terrible granularity (e.g. can't have a Qt app without pulling in all KDE stuff).

Basically it feels like one step forward (portable packages) and three steps back (losing everything else you learned to love about package managers). It feels like it was build to solve the problems of packaging proprietary apps while contributing little to the Free Software world.

I am sticking with Nix, which feels way closer to what I expect from a Free Software package manager (e.g. it can do nix run github:user/project?ref=v0.1.0).

i like using bottles & steam flatpaks on debian because they use newer mesa in their containers. so the best of both worlds with stable debian but more updated gaming drivers

It's pretty nice on my steamdeck no issues to report. I prefer a nice Deb package but on the deck flatpaks get preserved over upgrades.

Great. Works on anything without any issues. I use it for pretty much everything (except web browser and only because I don't wanna bother with permissions on that)... As for the size argument, I have also never had isssues with space, my laptop has 128GB of storage total and the /home partition on my desktop is ~100GB, both use fllatpaks for pretty much everything, I have no issues with space on either... And yes I use flatpaks on gentoo, cry about it.

I used it once, as a last resort when I wanted to try some program that had a ridiculous set of build dependencies that was just too much. It was okay, I guess.

Two issues I have with them.

First the size. Being on a poor internet connection makes downloading them painful. Some apps are 200MB for the apt or a flatpak install 1.5GB! Also doesn't help with disk space.

Second I often have issues saving files. Some apps use non standard folder location and some still save them to the non standard location even when you select one of you own. Block bench was bad. I'm not sure what causes this, if it wasn't for the size I would probably spend more time looking for a fix.

When it works if works pretty well. When it don't it's a pain in the ass

I really like AppImage, but so far my experiences with flatpak have all been pretty terrible.

None. I have no reason to. Prefer integrated distro packages than some bloated isolated package ball.

Flatpaks saved my bacon when I borked my Linux work computer and didn't have time to fix it. Spent 2 months with half my apps on Flatpak because the native ones weren't working.

It's also great as a developer. While I do provide x86 and arm binaries, I don't bother distributing them in 20 different formats. The website links to Flathub, and the number of distro/Mesa specific issues has dropped to 0.

Edit: Also see- Pros of Using Flatpak

I use it on my pi400 running rpios Bookworm. Easier to install things like Okular and other apps without installing all of the overhead of KDE/Gnome. Counting the necessary kde/gnome libs I currently have 33 flatpaks installed.

I use Flatpaks (on Arch btw) whenever possible. My only issues are some apps can be difficult to work with if they require external programs (like VS Code with Docker, or Ardour with plugins), and how slow updating is (I feel like I'm updating the KDE or nVidia dependencies every day, and it takes several minutes, when pacman can download and install several gigabytes of packages in 30s).

My experience with flatpaks has been mostly good. I tend to opt more towards .deb based apps, with flatpak being a fallback option. With that being said, the Pycharm Pro and Spyder flatpaks don’t run well at all on my system, with Pycharm being too heavy, and Spyder crashing due to Kvantum incompatibility.

I absolutely love it. Easy to find newer versions of things than what's in my distro's repos, easy to update. The only snags I've encountered is sometimes (very rarely) a program won't have access to part of my storage or my system's dark theme isn't applied. The former is super rare and the latter is usually 5min of searching the web to remember how to change the theme for a flatpak.

EDIT: after reading some of the other comments, I should mention that I only use it for GUI applications. I've not yet tried any TUI/CLI applications as flatpaks.

Mixed bag...

It's only really an option for GUI applications which I intend to launch from a GUI which is a real turn-off as a long-time CLI user. I often want to run something like gimp file.ext from the CLI but can't (easily) with a flatpak.

I also find the permission system gets in the way quite frequently as well. Like I was using some graphics program from a flatpak (I forget which - rawtherapee or maybe digikam) and it could only see certain directories. I get the security restrictions but it was a bit of hoop-jumping to try to figure out how to get that to stop, and in the end I just installed the snap...

Really my only complaint is that updating them is kinda wonky. I have to run the command multiple times to get them all updated. I'll get cryptic error messages and then just have to run it again and again until it goes through.

I had heroic games launcher as a flatpak and my FPS was 33% lower than a native install of heroic

Mostly okay. My only annoyance is setting up electron apps to use Wayland.