Linux

I've gone back to using packages from my repo. I was all-in with flatpaks for a while because they tend to be more up to date than my distro's packages and I liked the idea of the sandboxing but in practice I've found it a nuisance getting applications to speak to each other and I don't like all the redundant code bloating my internal drive. The thing that really did it for me though was the other day when I had to restore my system from a Timeshift backup. It took an hour and a half to restore a recent backup, with well over 90% of that time showing as flatpak stuff.

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...

Screwed up fonts in GTK software, even though the xdg-portal app for KDE is installed. At some point I just gave up. I see no reason to install any Flatpak if the software in question is already in the distro's repository and current enough anyway. Maybe except OBS, because the Flatpak version comes with Youtube integration which, to my understanding, needs to remain closed source and won't make it into a FOSS repository.

It's fine. No real crash/stability issues on the flatpaks I've installed. The real downsides are that, yeah, some apps don't integrate well with the rest of the system either in some functions or theming, due to the sandboxing, and if an app has many or large dependencies it can take up a lot of space compared to a native/repo app and you also may then have more than one copy of those dependencies on your system. That doesn't usually cause conflicts (a positive side of sandboxing), but it may be a problem on smaller storage devices if you use a lot of flatpaks or need other large apps installed.

None whatsoever. Thankfully.

Absolutely fucking awful. I’ve had issues with every one I’ve used.

Been trying to move to silverblue/ublue/sericia.

Firefox comes out of the box as both a system package and a flatpak. The flatpak does WebGL stuff fine, but video is broken; the system package does video, but webgl is broken.

Boxes was the first app I had needed to open a file with, and every time I need to, I have to restart some systemd portal service first. And there’s no guest to host audio.

I always had this problem with Inkscape on standard fedora where the icons on the layers menu would be corrupted. Wasn’t so on my first use of it with flatpak. Great! But subsequent runs the issue returned.

Discord worked fine for a few weeks. Then it started crashing on launch. A bit of googling and installing an old MESA platform flatpak had the problem resolved… for a day.

The only flatpak that has worked without a hitch has been Spotify.

Everything is so different, I have no idea how to debug this shit. And even then, I’m not 15 with unlimited time and zero dollars any more. I don’t have the time to spend 5 hours working out why my image editors icons are wrong.

Having a one-stop distribution-agnostic repository where it’s easy to install software devops-style is a win. (Setting up custom repos, or installing the latest rpm every week (looking at you discord) can be a pain). Buuut I’m not convinced.

I am on MicroOS-based distro, so all my GUI applications are from Flatpak. I don’t see any difference from more traditional distro, it just works.

The only problem I've encounter was the steam client not recognising my controller and then I've decided to install steam non-flatpak.

I have made very good experience with Steam installed from flatpak. Only my loved browser "qutebrowser" seems to be abandoned in the flathub-repo. It takes so much time to compile it on Gentoo, so flatpak is a very good fallback for programs with painful compile times.

They take a lot of space but the advantages you get are amazing, VScodium broke again this week, I could just rollback to the commit that worked with no issues. I can install apps I don't trust and not give them any permission over my filesystem. And best of all: it works on any distro so I know my setup is reproducible easily.

All the problem I haven encountered with flatpak is short-term (GPU passthrough, wayland support etc), and all of them either dont work or require a one time fix.

Basically if I dont encounter problem on the frist day, I have never encounteted any problem after that, unless a update introduced some bug in the software, of course.

I have replaced every app, that can be replaced, with flatpak. My only gripe is that they don't follow the system theme by default.

Great. I like being able to deny apps permission to my home folder with a simple flick via Flatseal. Only issue I have with it is the slow update times, flathub seriously need to get more mirrors.

They don't seem to play nice with autostart, on kde at least. Updates sometimes need to retry a couple of times. Other than that no problems on my end. I'm using a read only root fedora spin and mainly distrobox-export apps on arch for anything missing, or rpm-ostree for the odd thing I need to start at boot.

I started on Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora. Native apps where often horrible. I remember SciDavis for Ubuntu being completely broken, Libreoffice for Fedora, and Flatpak just worked.

Officially supported Flatpaks are great, a bit like the Windows way but better, as they are reviewed, containerized and in an actual repository.

But flatpakking random apps isnt that easy, but I really want to learn it. Especially an easy semi-automatic way of converting Appimages (may they burn in hell) to Flatpaks. Like BalenaEtcher and so many more.

Also, Flatpaks are not secure in the case of biig projects. Nearly all the known Linux apps like Libreoffice, Gimp, Inkscape etc are unisolated. And trying to specify the permissions (only home and all the mounts, instead of your entire root partition) gives you "they are insecure anyways and should get portals" and your PRs closed.

So they are in a very incomplete state currently, and you need to manually secure them to be actually kinda protected. But without Portals, entire home access is not actually isolated.

Also, try and use the --verified repo:

flatpak remote-add --subset=verified flathub-verified https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Problem here is that many apps like VLC, that work great, are not yet adopted by upstream, so the verified repo is not really usable currently.

And native messaging (keepassxc-browser, etc.) and other things are not always working. Drag&drop is, for some reason, but not in Firefox, maybe there are different ways.

most flatpaks are awesome, it's my preferred way to get apps. except for steam and syncthing. for some reason no amount of fuckery in flatseal can get flatpak-steam to correctly recognize my game drive or flatpak-syncthing to actually sync files from certain locations. for everything else tho flatpaks rock

Only using it for Telegram at the moment but it's been good. A like slow to launch but otherwise works great and integrates with the notification features of Linux Mint.

Other things like WhatsApp, Inoreader, Mastodon, Lemmy I run as a web app using Mint's brilliant web app tool which makes the web app like and with like a native app.

Don't really see the point of installing a whole other package manager, personally. If its not in the repos or AUR, I'll just compile from source.

I haven't figured out an easy way to install a specific version of an app, which means that when an app update is broken I'm out of luck until a fix is released, so I'll install the snap of the app until then (Spotify is a recent example). Don't like that.

For recent machines it works fine, but on older machines it feels slower than non-encapsulated software.

Most apps worked out of the box. It feels like gimp is a little bit (very tiny) slower at starting. For OpenTTD i had to manually add the x11 access in flatseal. And for osu! it is the only way i can play the current version, and that just works.