What has been your experience with Flatpak?

I’ve been involved with Linux for a long time, and Flatpak almost seems too good to be true:
Just install any app on any distro, isolated from the base system and with granular rights management. I’ve just set up my first flatpak-centric system and didn’t notice any issues with it at all, apart from a 1-second waiting time before an app is launched.

What’s your long-term experience?

Notice any annoying bugs or instabilities? Do apps crash a lot? Disappear from Flathub or are unmaintained? Do you often have issues with apps that don’t integrate well with your native system? Are important apps missing?

I_like_cats,

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

upperleft,

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.

Evotech,

It’s sandboxed though. Running an app from a developer already implies trust on your part. So if it’s sandboxed away from your other stuff, what’s the issue?

upperleft, (edited )

Sandboxed just means an app can’t reach out to the rest of the OS. What about the information I am entrusting to it to process?

If my browser is a flatpak, it likely has access to most of the information I care about. If I am using a chat app that is a flatpak, it can read my most personal communications. Why do I care if it can read what is in /etc?

Relevant: xkcd.com/1200/

Running an app from a developer already implies trust on your part.

You totally missed my point. My point was that a lot of flatpaks are packaged by unknown third parties. I would love it if the devs would package things as flatpaks directly, but that is mostly not the case.

Looking at flathub right now. 1567 applications are from unverified publishers vs 789 verified. Unverified apps include chrome, edge, chromium, brave, BITWARDEN and signal. All of those applications process highly sensitive information.

oldGregg,

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

hottari,

You can pin the Nvidia driver with flatpak mask appname and update the rest of your apps.

Presi300,
@Presi300@lemmy.world avatar

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.

lloram239,

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).

Kusimulkku,

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.

Anticorp,

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.

exception4289,

I haven’t tried it but doesn’t flatseal let you setup steam’s permissions to allow external/additional directories or mounts?
What’s stopping steam’s access to other directories?

Dreadful6644,

It works when set up with flatseal.

Anticorp,

Ah, I haven’t heard of flatseal before.

grue,

The trick is knowing how to do it. I still haven’t fixed my Zoom install to successfully download emojis (which I suspect requires a filesystem permission it doesn’t have by default)…

The_Zen_Cow_Says_Mu,

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

aport,

This is the setup for me too. It’s been fantastic

possiblylinux127,
  • slight correction: flatpak doesn’t run apps in a container
andruid,

Since it supports OCI images, and uses some of the same sandboxing tech I’d say there is a blurred line here for sure.

Kusimulkku,

Similar reason, with flatpaks having codecs with them so no need for outside the distro codec repo. (Talking about openSUSE here but might be the same for Fedora)

toasteecup,

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.

OsrsNeedsF2P,

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

jsdz,

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.

yote_zip,
@yote_zip@pawb.social avatar

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.

AProfessional,

deleted_by_author

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    yote_zip,
    @yote_zip@pawb.social avatar

    I wasn’t able to get the gsettings method to work (I’m on Wayland KDE), and that article doesn’t say anything about theming QT Flatpaks. Also, after “installing” my GTK theme as a flatpak via the method described, it still wasn’t available to my GTK Flatpaks via the GTK_THEME method. The steps in the itsfoss.com article do work, though there’s been a lot of squabbles about the “proper” way to expose themes to Flatpaks. Regardless, this all goes back to my point that theming Flatpak is clunky and should be much smoother.

    AProfessional,

    GTK_THEME is a development env var, it’s not expected to work in many cases. For example GtkSettings:gtk-theme won’t even contain it so apps can be confused.

    The post details exactly how it works but yes it’s only about GTK.

    yote_zip,
    @yote_zip@pawb.social avatar

    Right, I understand it’s not supposed to be used in “proper” usage, but it does work for all my GTK apps and the gsettings method does not work for me. Unless I’m supposed to store it somewhere else because I’m on KDE.

    AProfessional,

    You must not have xdg-desktop-portal-gtk.

    I think one recent release was also bugged but it’s fixed if up to date.

    yote_zip, (edited )
    @yote_zip@pawb.social avatar

    I do have xdg-desktop-portal-gtk on Debian Stable, which is currently at 1.14.1-1. I’ll look around to see if there’s more documentation on this method, because I would prefer to not use the debug variables if possible.

    Edit: I launched with GTK_DEBUG=interactive and I can see the theme inside the Flatpak gets set to Adwaita-empty instead of my actual theme, which does get properly returned via gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-theme

    AProfessional,

    The way to test what GTK actually gets is this command:

    gdbus call -e -d org.freedesktop.portal.Desktop -o /org/freedesktop/portal/desktop -m org.freedesktop.portal.Settings.Read org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-theme

    yote_zip,
    @yote_zip@pawb.social avatar

    That gets my normal GTK theme properly. I found a little more discussion on this here. Nothing very actionable but I did also confirm that my xdg-desktop-portal-gtk is running. It seems like this is supposed to be working, but I have a mostly stock Debian 12.1 KDE install and something seems to be wrong somewhere in the chain. I’ve also tried multiple GTK Flatpaks with the same results.

    Edit: Also, I have both my themes folder exposed and the theme installed as a Flatpak via the linked script.

    OsrsNeedsF2P,

    I haven’t noticed any start-time delays when launching Flatpaks as opposed to regular apps

    OPs case sounds like it’s distro-specific, rather than Flatpak specific. Flatpaks don’t do the Snap thing that bloats start time

    Secret300,

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

    heleos,

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

    SomethingBurger,

    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).

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