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?

Caboose12000,

most flatpaks are awesome, it’s my preferred way to get apps. except for steam and syncthing. for some reason no amount of fuckery in flatseal can get flatpak-steam to correctly recognize my game drive or flatpak-syncthing to actually sync files from certain locations. for everything else tho flatpaks rock

Toribor,
@Toribor@corndog.social avatar

Flatpaks are sandboxed to user space. I use Flatseal which allows you to grant flatpaks additional permissions. I used it to allow the flatpak version of syncthing to sync files that it otherwise lacked read/write permissions for.

That solution has worked really well for me and resolved my main frustration with flatpaks.

Caboose12000,

yeah I mentioned I used flatseal lol. Ive tried giving it specific narrow permissions and I’ve tried just enabling everything and giving it full perms but nothing works great the way other versions of syncthing and steam just work

Pantherina,

Syncthingy works great? Try either Flatseal or KDEs flatpak permission settings to add the directories you are missing. As long as all packages use Portals, either they are completely unisolated or they break in those ways. I prefer the second option and add the needed directories

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

danielfgom,
@danielfgom@lemmy.world avatar

Only using it for Telegram at the moment but it’s been good. A like slow to launch but otherwise works great and integrates with the notification features of Linux Mint.

Other things like WhatsApp, Inoreader, Mastodon, Lemmy I run as a web app using Mint’s brilliant web app tool which makes the web app like and with like a native app.

art,
@art@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve been using Flatpak applications for a year (I think) and it’s been wonderful. There are a few bugs here and there but overall way less headaches.

I can run my mature, rock solid Debian system and sell have the freshest builds of desktop software that I use.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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