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?

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.

TheAnonymouseJoker,
@TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml avatar

Starting delay for first time, then smooth sailing. But Flatpak has a major con over Snap - sandboxed system integration of programs.

craigevil,
@craigevil@lemmy.ml avatar

I use it on my pi400 running rpios Bookworm. Easier to install things like Okular and other apps without installing all of the overhead of KDE/Gnome. Counting the necessary kde/gnome libs I currently have 33 flatpaks installed.

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.

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.

madmaurice,
@madmaurice@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

None whatsoever. Thankfully.

atzanteol,

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…

andruid,

I really wish I had a proper portal interface that put a cli tools in my path and asked me if I’m sure I want to give the tool permission to that path (you know because of filesystem separation, obviously don’t ask if it’s already given that permission).

Basically I agree, flatpaks shell interactions are sub par.

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.

LastoftheDinosaurs,
@LastoftheDinosaurs@lemmy.world avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    KISSmyOS,

    Welcome to Slackware, friend!

    Churbleyimyam,

    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.

    mactan,

    it’s my preference for proprietary apps

    wispydust,

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

    clemdemort,
    @clemdemort@lemmy.world avatar

    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.

    mcepl,
    @mcepl@lemmy.world avatar

    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.

    recarsion,

    I avoid it like the plague. It’s fat and slow, and the Arch repos + the AUR have just about everything anyway (I use Arch btw, in case you’re wondering). I’ll sooner build from source than touch anything flatpak.

    EddoWagt,

    It’s fat and slow

    With modern hardware neither of those really are an issue. You can get a 1 TB nvme ssd for €50 and 2 TB for less than a 100. That should lend you plenty of storage and speed

    recarsion,

    I still find it noticeable 🤷 I do have an nvme ssd, and while 50 eur is negligible to you or me, not everyone is so lucky, + there’s no reason to create e-waste when your older hardware is working fine.

    Presi300,
    @Presi300@lemmy.world avatar

    AUR can be an unstable mess at times (yes, it’s very convenient, but it has flaws and arch isn’t the only distro out there. Also the space argument just makes no sense, yes the 1st time you download a flatpak, it downloads like 1~2GB of dependencies, but after that all other flatpaks use said dependencies and are a fraction of the size. So ironically, flatpaks end up using less space than AUR packages, if you don’t clean out their cache…

    recarsion, (edited )

    Yeah I’m always wary of what I install from the AUR, never more than 1 or 2 packages on any given system. But a surprising amount of stuff can be found even in the main arch repos, so the AUR is rarely necessary.

    Pantherina,

    There are too many, especially outdated runtimes in use. That is a problem. I have like 7GB of runtimes, somewhere a year ago when I roughly counted it.

    Presi300,
    @Presi300@lemmy.world avatar

    flatpak remove --unused

    Pantherina,

    All in use by like one app. Sorted them 100 times, still some need it and I need the app

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