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?

Anticorp,

It’s great if the pak meets your needs. For Steam the pak didn’t meet my needs because it doesn’t allow you to add additional library locations. As long as it’s set up in a way that works for you then it’s a big time saver.

exception4289,

I haven’t tried it but doesn’t flatseal let you setup steam’s permissions to allow external/additional directories or mounts?
What’s stopping steam’s access to other directories?

Dreadful6644,

It works when set up with flatseal.

Anticorp,

Ah, I haven’t heard of flatseal before.

grue,

The trick is knowing how to do it. I still haven’t fixed my Zoom install to successfully download emojis (which I suspect requires a filesystem permission it doesn’t have by default)…

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.

mojo,

Really awesome. They’re all contained within my home directory too, so when I swap distros I can just copy my home dir and all my installed apps are carried over that way. Super useful feature that never gets mentioned! The downside to flatpaks is having to use them for cli in any way is a huge pain.

HW07,

Why not use a seperate /home partition if that’s something you value?

mojo,

I do, that doesn’t keep packages installed between distro reinstalls or swapping between entirely different distros. I’m talking about the actual packages and app data themselves that are contained in home.

jack,

For automatic installation I recommend ansible, its real easy

mojo,

There’s literally no need. It’s auto installed because everything is portable and most applications that launch .desktop files know to look for it’s directory.

jack, (edited )

that doesn’t keep packages installed between distro reinstalls or swapping between entirely different distros. I’m talking about the actual packages and app data themselves that are contained in home.

It’s auto installed because everything is portable

Then you didn’t explain it very well. Your former comment clearly states that copying the files keeps the packages (so you don’t have to redownload?) and the data, but “doesn’t keep packages installed” (hinting that .desktop files don’t get found)

The_Zen_Cow_Says_Mu,

i like using bottles & steam flatpaks on debian because they use newer mesa in their containers. so the best of both worlds with stable debian but more updated gaming drivers

aport,

This is the setup for me too. It’s been fantastic

possiblylinux127,
  • slight correction: flatpak doesn’t run apps in a container
andruid,

Since it supports OCI images, and uses some of the same sandboxing tech I’d say there is a blurred line here for sure.

Kusimulkku,

Similar reason, with flatpaks having codecs with them so no need for outside the distro codec repo. (Talking about openSUSE here but might be the same for Fedora)

madmaurice,
@madmaurice@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

None whatsoever. Thankfully.

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.

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.

DrRatso,

Don’t like them, they are annoying to deal with - CLI naming is odd, files are stored unintuitively and if your whole system is not on flatpak, chances are the sizes are going to be absurd. One of the main reasons I wen’t with Arch is Pacman + AUR, never have to install a flatpak, because the package management is so good.

Kusimulkku,

I don’t think the size thing is much of an issue these days outside of say IoT or very old computers. Absurd for say a single calculator app to be weighing like a gig or however much Gnome runtime is, but even in that situation it’s not much of an actual problem imo. And once you install anything else using that same runtime, you in a way halved the size of that app.

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).

Kerb, (edited )
@Kerb@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

ive had supprisingly little issues with flatpaks.

i have been running silverblue for about half a year now, and rely heavily on them.

i can remember 3 distinct issues:

vs code commandlines start in the sandbox, which needs a workarround (rather understandable)

either the fedora, or the flathub build of firefox didnt come with some video codec, OpenH264 i think. switching to the other build fixed it (imo more a licensing issue with the codec than a flatpak problem)

on rare occasions (about once every 3 month)
steam behaves weirdly, and refuses to start until i update the flatpak.

other than that, it has been a smoth ride.

KISSmyOS, (edited )

either the fedora, or the flathub build of firefox didnt come with some video codec, OpenH264 i think. switching to the other build fixed it (imo more a licensing issue with the codec than a flatpak problem)

Just in case anyone in this thread also has problems with video playback on flathub Firefox, I just solved that by installing the ffmpeg-full flatpak.
No idea why a dependency that is needed to play video without jitter isn’t installed automatically.

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.

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.

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)

LastoftheDinosaurs,
@LastoftheDinosaurs@lemmy.world avatar

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    KISSmyOS,

    Welcome to Slackware, friend!

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