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?

jimmy90,

some things only work properly using Flatpak - Steam/CS:GO and Shotcut video editor, other things don’t work well at all - VSCodium so it depends i guess. i use Arch/Gnome/AMD gpu

lloram239,

I am not terribly impressed. The ability to build and run apps in a well defined and portable sandbox environment is nice. But everything else is kind of terrible. Seemingly simple things like having a package that contains multiple binaries aren’t properly supported. There are no LTS runtimes, so you’ll have to update your packages every couple of months anyway or users will get scary errors due to obsolete runtimes. No way to run a flatpak without installing. Terrible DNS based naming scheme. Dependency resolving requires too much manual intervention. Too much magic behind the scene that makes it hard to tell what is going on (e.g. ostree). No support for dependency other than the three available runtimes and thus terrible granularity (e.g. can’t have a Qt app without pulling in all KDE stuff).

Basically it feels like one step forward (portable packages) and three steps back (losing everything else you learned to love about package managers). It feels like it was build to solve the problems of packaging proprietary apps while contributing little to the Free Software world.

I am sticking with Nix, which feels way closer to what I expect from a Free Software package manager (e.g. it can do nix run github:user/project?ref=v0.1.0).

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.

upperleft,

My experience with flatpak has been stellar from a technical perspective has been stellar.

Where it currently falls short for me personally is trust. With my distro I am putting my trust into the maintainers, but with flatpak its… random people for most apps?

It is tough when it is not a primary channel of distribution for most devs, but I am optimistic that will change in the future.

Evotech,

It’s sandboxed though. Running an app from a developer already implies trust on your part. So if it’s sandboxed away from your other stuff, what’s the issue?

upperleft, (edited )

Sandboxed just means an app can’t reach out to the rest of the OS. What about the information I am entrusting to it to process?

If my browser is a flatpak, it likely has access to most of the information I care about. If I am using a chat app that is a flatpak, it can read my most personal communications. Why do I care if it can read what is in /etc?

Relevant: xkcd.com/1200/

Running an app from a developer already implies trust on your part.

You totally missed my point. My point was that a lot of flatpaks are packaged by unknown third parties. I would love it if the devs would package things as flatpaks directly, but that is mostly not the case.

Looking at flathub right now. 1567 applications are from unverified publishers vs 789 verified. Unverified apps include chrome, edge, chromium, brave, BITWARDEN and signal. All of those applications process highly sensitive information.

hatchet,

I haven’t figured out an easy way to install a specific version of an app, which means that when an app update is broken I’m out of luck until a fix is released, so I’ll install the snap of the app until then (Spotify is a recent example). Don’t like that.

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.

Chaewon,
@Chaewon@lemmygrad.ml avatar

They are great, I use them over the native package whenever I can on Fedora Workstation. Can’t say I’ve had any issues with them in recent years.

treadful,
@treadful@lemmy.zip avatar

None. I have no reason to. Prefer integrated distro packages than some bloated isolated package ball.

jack,

Dependencies are deduplicated/reused (no bloat) and there are no and won’t be any dependency issues

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.

possiblylinux127,

Flatpaks are great. I do wish flatseal was part of the flatpak standard. I want an android style permissions menu

bjoern_tantau,
@bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de avatar

Well, Flatseal is using flatpak’s standard way of managing permissions. Everything it does you can also do from the command line with flatpak. It’s just a frontend.

I think KDE wants to add these options to it’s settings as well. That will be great, when it’s better integrated into the whole system.

LaggyKar,
@LaggyKar@programming.dev avatar

KDE already does have the same thing in its settings

Kusimulkku,

I’d like to see permission pop ups so I know it wanted permission to do something and didn’t have them, having to ask me. Sometimes it is explained that certain stuff the app does are blocked by the sandbox by default for security, but you can enable it, which is alright. Sometimes you’ll just have to find that out for yourself.

fxdave,

I wish it would be possible now but it probably won’t happen until windows and mac will have similar features. The problem is that processes cannot just read a file, because in the container it doesn’t exist. It’s maybe due to permission. Maybe not. You cannot tell. Android apps are written in a way that they request access, while pc apps are just reading the files directly without requesting permission.

So the app has to be written for flatpak. However, afaik, this is the maintainers goal too. Btw, the file open dialog is a currently working example of the dynamic permission handling. It’s just that the app should use these features which is not guaranteed.

Kusimulkku,

That makes sense. Unfortunate that we won’t have it anytime soon

Redoomed, (edited )

I want an android style permissions menu

Same. In addition to the prompt-based permissions that @Kusimulkku brings up, I’d like to see more granular control of permissions. For example, a flatpak app’s access to webcams, controllers, etc. are all controlled through just one permission: –device=all (aka “Device Access” in KDE’s Flatpak Permission Settings).

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.

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.

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.

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