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?

I_like_cats,

Flatpak is good for chat apps and proprietary apps which you don’t want to have full access to your system

beeng,

deleted_by_author

    •
    stockRot,

    Flatpaks are integrated into the store. If you’re using fedora.

    If you’re using Ubuntu, then snaps are probably integrated. What I’m trying to say here is that your comment is useless if you’re not going to mention your OS

    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.

    heleos,

    I had heroic games launcher as a flatpak and my FPS was 33% lower than a native install of heroic

    BoneALisa,
    @BoneALisa@lemm.ee avatar

    I just had to switch my work computer from Arch to Ubuntu becusse they want MDM on all computers now, and flatpaks are litetally the only reason i can tolerate it.

    I now prioritise getting stuff from flatpaks, then the repos, and if they dont exist i use Distrobox to export any app thats only on the AUR for example.

    mfat,

    I’m a fan of anything that would make it easier for developers to bring their apps to linux.

    Presi300,
    @Presi300@lemmy.world avatar

    Great. Works on anything without any issues. I use it for pretty much everything (except web browser and only because I don’t wanna bother with permissions on that)… As for the size argument, I have also never had isssues with space, my laptop has 128GB of storage total and the /home partition on my desktop is ~100GB, both use fllatpaks for pretty much everything, I have no issues with space on either… And yes I use flatpaks on gentoo, cry about it.

    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

    Caravaggio,

    What’s your long-term experience?

    Excellent. After uninstalling it never comes back.

    crispy_kilt,

    I don’t like it. Updating dependencies in case of security problems is impossible, I have to wait for the developer to release an update. Also, it wastes a lot of space. Pollutes df output. App startup is slooow.

    Just use the native packaging system! There is no reason software can’t be released using that.

    Presi300,
    @Presi300@lemmy.world avatar

    idk what type of drive you’re using, but flatpak startup times are indistinguishable to me, when compared to native packages. And I’ve used flatpaks on A LOT of computers…

    araozu,

    Just to provide counter examples, in arch I can’t use the native steam package and play games with proton. It just doesn’t work. I think proton expects some ubuntu libraries or something (found something like that while spending 5 hours debugging nfs heat). And even if I manage to fix it, next time I update the system it’ll be broken again.

    I use flatpak, and everything just works.

    However, in arch if something is in the official repo or the AUR i prefer those.

    In ubuntu I installed krita and gmic, but it doesn’t work. For some reason krita doesn’t find the gmic executable. Instead of debugging krita and gmic for hours I just installed the flatpak version, and it just works.

    And yeah, app startup went from 5 to 7-10 seconds in krita, and from 1 to 2-3 seconds in firefox. It’s not snap, it’s 2023, we have SSDs.

    themoken,

    Really? I use Arch native Steam and Proton no problem. You either use steam-runtime (uses built in Ubuntu runtime) or steam-native (expects Arch packages) but there is a meta package for pulling the runtime deps. Both have worked for me.

    That said, Flatpak has come in clutch for me as well on the Steam Deck, and for things like Prism Launcher (modded Minecraft launcher) where you want to juggle multiple Java versions without needing to run archlinux-java between switching packs.

    jbk,

    Wdym by df pollution? That’s the case with snap, not flatpak

    przmk,

    There’s a pretty simple reason. It’s that developers don’t have to spend the time to package for every single distro. I know I wouldn’t, I’d just focus on packaging for the distro that I use and flatpak. Having flatpak also means that some less known distros start with a big amount of apps available from the get go with flatpak.

    Pantherina,

    I see that fragmentation of runtimes is a problem. If all apps would simply use the same runtime, and a modern one, and there was a package manager that installs the missing dependencies, that would be nice.

    The diskspace is a true problem too, just because of the fragmented runtimes.

    But Distros are fragmented too. If simply everyone could unify, at least a bit, instead of at least 5 different big Distros competing, every app could just work. But thats not the case, so Flatpaks often work best, and maany packages are either only .deb, .rpm or even only on Arch

    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.

    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

    wispydust,

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

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