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?

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)

hellvolution,
@hellvolution@lemmygrad.ml avatar

Why flatpak when I have apt/.deb? I never needed, at all, any flatpaks

Pantherina,

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:


<span style="color:#323232;">flatpak remote-add --subset=verified flathub-verified https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
</span>

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.

TheGrandNagus,

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

ChristianWS,

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.

snowday,

Check out Warehouse for deleting app data

KISSmyOS,

So how do you delete app data after uninstalling?
And does uninstalling a flatpak app also uninstall flatpak dependencies that came with it?

spez,

flatpak uninstall --delete-data example-package

Dr_Willis, (edited )

And does uninstalling a flatpak app also uninstall flatpak dependencies that came with it?

from what I have seen, NO it does not do so automatically. there is a flatpak command option to clean out unused runtimes, and another to remove user data.

delete app data after uninstalling?

you either manually delete the data, or there’s some flatpak command option, or you can use a tool such as warehouse which is available as a flatpak.

other posts list the specific commands.

mcmodknower,

you can use flatpak remove --unused --delete-data to remove all unused dependencies and delete their data.

AProfessional,

from what I have seen, NO it does not. there is a flatpak command option to clean out unused runtimes.

It does. The unused command is mostly for after updates, then what’s used may have changed.

limitedduck,

If you install your flatpaks through the discover store it gives you an option to delete data whenever you uninstall

TheGrandNagus,

Same on Gnome software

But I guess I agree that it should prompt you when doing it through a TUI

wispydust,

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

jimmy90,

some things only work properly using Flatpak - Steam/CS:GO and Shotcut video editor, other things don’t work well at all - VSCodium so it depends i guess. i use Arch/Gnome/AMD gpu

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).

RecallMadness, (edited )

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.

hatchet,

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.

Grass,

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.

mojo,

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.

HW07,

Why not use a seperate /home partition if that’s something you value?

mojo,

I do, that doesn’t keep packages installed between distro reinstalls or swapping between entirely different distros. I’m talking about the actual packages and app data themselves that are contained in home.

jack,

For automatic installation I recommend ansible, its real easy

mojo,

There’s literally no need. It’s auto installed because everything is portable and most applications that launch .desktop files know to look for it’s directory.

jack, (edited )

that doesn’t keep packages installed between distro reinstalls or swapping between entirely different distros. I’m talking about the actual packages and app data themselves that are contained in home.

It’s auto installed because everything is portable

Then you didn’t explain it very well. Your former comment clearly states that copying the files keeps the packages (so you don’t have to redownload?) and the data, but “doesn’t keep packages installed” (hinting that .desktop files don’t get found)

Chaewon,
@Chaewon@lemmygrad.ml avatar

They are great, I use them over the native package whenever I can on Fedora Workstation. Can’t say I’ve had any issues with them in recent years.

treadful,
@treadful@lemmy.zip avatar

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

jack,

Dependencies are deduplicated/reused (no bloat) and there are no and won’t be any dependency issues

DrRatso,

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.

Kusimulkku,

I don’t think the size thing is much of an issue these days outside of say IoT or very old computers. Absurd for say a single calculator app to be weighing like a gig or however much Gnome runtime is, but even in that situation it’s not much of an actual problem imo. And once you install anything else using that same runtime, you in a way halved the size of that app.

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