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?

Grangle1,

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.

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).

Lantern,

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.

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

doomkernel,

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

Magister,
@Magister@lemmy.world avatar

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.

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.

deadcatbounce,
@deadcatbounce@reddthat.com avatar

Positive to the extent that it’s my preferred. For graphical apps only, not sure I need to say that.

GitHub priority selection didn’t seem to work, but I select that as a default.

Stable, a few bugs and the user mode addition/ removal is a bonus. I don’t try to install low scored apps. I Gnome-Software and then Google for reviews.

Custom install of Fedora 38/Gnome.

spez,

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.

narrowide96lochkreis,

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.

tvcvt,

My experience has been mostly positive. I hit a situation a couple times where a particular app hanging will prevent other flatpaks from launching. That took a while to figure out, but otherwise it’s pretty good. In general things work the way they’re supposed to.

mcmodknower,

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.

baseless_discourse, (edited )

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.

Strit,
@Strit@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show avatar

The couple of apps I use through flatpak has not had any issues as far as I can tell. Other than maybe being a little slow to get pushed to the newest version.

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