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?

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.

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.

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)…

poinck,

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.

hottari,

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.

Lydia_K,
@Lydia_K@startrek.website avatar

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

ShittyBeatlesFCPres,

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.

hobbsc,

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.

qwesx,
@qwesx@kbin.social avatar

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.

russjr08,
@russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.net avatar

I take it you’re on Wayland? The fonts issue is a bug that’s being fixed IIRC in KDE’s portal, but as a workaround for now you can install the GTK desktop portal, which should make the fonts render correctly.

(That is, if you end up needing to use other Flatpaks that have an OBS-like situation)

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

    •
    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

    tony,

    Used it once… it’s as annoying as shit since you can’t just run apps you have to type ‘flatpack run org.mozilla.firefox’ instead of just typing ‘firefox’ (and I had to google that because I just can’t remember the sequence). Also for some reason it’s slow… as you mentioned a 1 second delay before anything works. I can’t see myself using it again.

    lvxferre, (edited )
    @lvxferre@lemmy.ml avatar

    As a local fix, you could set up an alias. Open .bashrc and add the following line: alias firefox=“flatpak run org.mozilla.firefox”

    tony,

    So now you have to do that every time you install a flatpak.

    Or just stick to a normal package manager, that does all that for you.

    KISSmyOS,

    You could do the free software thing and write a shell script that creates an alias every time you install something.

    Or use one that someone else has already written:
    opensource.com/…/launch-flatpaks-linux-terminal

    lvxferre,
    @lvxferre@lemmy.ml avatar

    Frankly? I’d rather stick to a normal package manager too, if available. But the alias trick is useful in a pinch, if you must use a flatpak.

    madmaurice,
    @madmaurice@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

    None whatsoever. Thankfully.

    Moobythegoldensock,

    They work great on linux tablets such as PineTab2 and rooted Samsung Galaxy tablets running PMOS. Often, games work better via Flatpak than from the distro’s package manager.

    LastoftheDinosaurs,
    @LastoftheDinosaurs@lemmy.world avatar

    deleted_by_author

    •
    KISSmyOS,

    Welcome to Slackware, friend!

    Kerb, (edited )
    @Kerb@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

    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.

    KISSmyOS, (edited )

    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)

    Just in case anyone in this thread also has problems with video playback on flathub Firefox, I just solved that by installing the ffmpeg-full flatpak.
    No idea why a dependency that is needed to play video without jitter isn’t installed automatically.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • linux@lemmy.ml
  • localhost
  • All magazines
    •
    Loading…
    Loading the web debug toolbar…
    Attempt #