What are your thoughts on Flatpak/Flathub?
What are your thoughts on Flatpak/Flathub?
Flathub aims to be the place to get and distribute apps for Linux. It is powered by Flatpak which allows Flathub apps to run on almost any Linux distribution.
How does it stack up against traditional package management and others like AUR and Nix?
I love flatpak. It makes it easier for Linux to become mainstream.
@tet its great because you can listen to people whine about it now instead of systemd
It's fantastic, for two reasons:
- There's so much great software available through it, and I can always get the latest version regardless of my distro - or an older version if it hasn't kept up with its dependencies.
- It's part of the tooling that allows me to update my operating system without risk of it breaking (i.e. I can use an atomic distro because of it).
I really like the idea of a universal app format and flatpak seems the best for it. And flathub has been great as a repo.
The idea of separate system layer (with traditional packages) and user app layer with flatpaks seems like the way to go. Perhaps even immutable system layer.
I think it's a good way for people to release software for Linux without having to deal with specific distro stuff (which historically has pretty much been "just provide a .deb for Ubuntu and a .tar.gz for other people to figure out").
I'm hoping that it pushes for more people porting stuff to Linux because it's a single target that gives you access to Steam Decks, Chromebooks and desktops.
I don't think it makes sense for things that aren't desktop applications such as servers or libraries, just because those tend to be open source, don't need to be that up to date and benefit from tighter system integration. I see it as something that sits on top of other package managers rather than replacing them.
For Flathub? Eh, if they turn out to be bad we can just all move to another server, we're not snap. :P I'm willing to bet that someone has already made a flatpak repo for Citra and Yuzu.
People need to realize that before Flatpak, distributing a small-time Linux app was a nightmare. Appimages were your best option if you wanted to avoid distro specific builds, PPAs and AUR, etc. Ever since packaging 2009scape on Flathub I haven't looked back. It auto updates. People can find it from software centers. It works on all distros. It connects straight to upstream's CICD. It even forced us to adopt XDG compliance so we could sandbox it better.
Yes, Flatpak has downsides like the download size (on disk it doesn't matter because it gets compressed and the runtimes are shared, same as literally any other package manager). But overall, I hugely welcome it over the options we had before. Much love to the Flatpak and Flathub devs!
I personally prefer to use Flatpaks over traditional packages because of the added security, sandboxing, and overall convenience of not having to deal with dependency hell. It's especially nice being able to have proprietary applications sandboxed from the rest of my system without worrying that Steam is snooping on my 'super-important-tax-documents'.
Flatpaks are also very useful for having up-to-date packages on distros like Debian, and it's derivatives. People can still use their preferred distro without having to worry about not getting a certain update, feature, bug fix, etc, for their applications.
Being able to restrict what applications have access to is a game-changer for me. A lot of times Flatpaks, by default, have very lenient permissions, and with the use of Flatseal I can restrict it to my liking. Worried about Audacity's telemetry?? Turn network permissions off. Now, not all applications will work well (or at all) without internet connectivity, but for applications like Audacity, it works great!! Flatpaks can also be very useful for developers.
That's not to say that Flatpaks are without their fair share of issues. Are they bloated?? Yeah, and although it's not an issue for me, it may be for some people. Desktop integration is, meh. Themes, and fonts don't always integrate the best. (A while back there were issues with Flatpak's sandbox, but I won't touch on that because I need to refresh my mind on it, and it was actively being developed to fix those issues so it possibly isn't even an issue anymore.)
Overall I think Flatpaks are absolutely wonderful.
Better than snaps and AppImages. Do I want every package on my system to be replaced by a Flatpak? No. Am I glad that I can ex. install Zotero as a Flatpak instead of having to build it myself? Yes.
I definitely prefer it over Snaps or appimages. Straight-forward to update, and Flatseal provides a nice GUI to control permissions (if needed). Themes may not work properly, but whatever, not a big deal for me.
The distro's repo is always my go-to. If it's not available there, then flatpak, and I'll use appimage under duress. If that doesn't work, I'll figure out a different solution.
While I don't think flatpak shouldn't replace traditional packages, I still like it.
Flatpak apps just work most of the time, they work without issues and are often very up to date. The sandboxing does have benefits because no apps interfere with it, the problem is that it doesn't work super well with other apps, sometimes the theming is off, and it doesn't work well with other apps, installing apps takes much longer, and it isn't as easily started from the command line.
Edit: typo
I use them for some things and I think they are fine. Mostly apps that are kinda messy and I want to keep them and their atrocious dependency tree away from my base system. I also like to use them for proprietary apps or apps where I actually want to use the sandbox. Other than that I prefer native packages 99% of the time.
Flatpak is slower to update than pacman, the cli interface just doesn't feel good to use. There is the weird naming, no real way to get a dependency tree, can't hide those annoying eol messages even for apps that I specifically don't want to update. Another thing is that not every app was made to run in a sandbox or it is just more difficult to use sometimes. A lot of people tend to cite ide's, but in my case I was having issues with the steam flatpak. Running games with steam was fine, but anytime I wanted to hook up something third party eg: mods, cheat engine, etc. Doing so in the flatpak either required some tinkering around the sandbox or straight up didn't work.
I feel like that last sentence sums up the whole experience. If you just need to point and click and have it work. Flatpak does that amazingly. If you need any kind of integration with other things, expect problems.
Edit: just wanted to add that, the whole point and click and work is fine for 99% of people which is why I and many others choose to use it.
Flatpak is fantastic for end-user GUI applications
Flathub is also great, but the fact that it's really the only repo that flatpak maintainers are using concerns me. I know I'm dreaming, but I would love to see some sort of federated or P2P hosting
Some of the under-the-hood implementation of Flatpak irritates me, like why the hell are we installing software in /var? Using it with the terminal is a pain because of the org.something.SomeThing shit it does, and I think Flatpak gives you all the drawbacks of app sandboxing with none of the benefits. It likes to not see the whole file structure; for instance I found the Flatpak version of Steam to be unusable because it wouldn't see anywhere I wanted to put my games library. That needs to be fixed.
That said, I think it's the better of the three all-distro package managers, it's got a central repository and package manager unlike Appimage so it's a place to publish and get stuff, and it's not tied to Canonical so it's obviously better than Snap.
Its a solution to one of the typical Linux issues. Its a step toward overcaming the fragmentation of Linux package managers.
I don't personally like it too much, I prefer the distro package stuff, but I understand the app developers cannot manage a plethora of different package formats.
Distro maintainters should, but its clearly more and more a massive task for different distros to keep up with the amount of apps out there.
Also, npm, pip and the various "packaging" ways existing add to the chaos.
I see distro package managers converge toward providing basic packages for the general system and some other solution like flatpack to provide additional stuff.
I think it would be wrong for flatpack/containers to replace package managers as well, it's not their scope.
I use it as the primary way of installing apps on my Steam Deck, as well as my Ubuntu PC (I also use Snap over there). The apps installed via Flatpak just work, so I have nothing to complain about.
I love them. They make the immutable distributions possible.
We need to stop with the idea of shared libraries, it's nice on the paper but in practice you only save a bit of disk space and it's a pain for developers to package for different distributions.
Distribution packages are great for core components of the system, or utilities everyone needs, but for end users applications something like flatpak makes more sense. This way it can be packaged by the upstream developer for all distributions, and sandboxing adds a layer of security. You wouldn't install an app that have all permissions on mobile, why do it on desktop?
👍
Don't like it, I try to avoid it wherever I can.
They have their uses. In particular they're useful for easily getting applications your system repositories don't have or getting more up to date version of applications. Downsides are certainly the space all the redundant dependencies take up and the sandboxing can be a PITA especially if you have an application that needs to run another application. Overall I think they're the best "third party" package system available but they're not great.
very cool and awesome
I prefer Flatpaks because it's a nice easy way of getting software without the chance of broken or missing dependencies for a program.
Much better than Snaps, snaps is flatpaks but MUCH worse and slower.
Great to me. My personal favorite piece is the portals system built to make permission access easier but transparent to the user. It also helps more pieces of the desktop space interoperate (for example use the system defined file picker instead of needing to ship your own).
I got sick and tired of the AUR for the simple packages so I started using it for most things I would use the AUR for, and I'm very happy with it. I think some packages have issues with default permissions - I was wondering why 86Box would forget my hard drive images but then I realised the permissions on my home folder weren't set properly - but that can be sorted anyway.
My main problem with Flatpak is that it hands temporary /var/run/1000 file links to programs instead of real filenames. That would almost be bearable, if Flatpak also took responsibility for keeping those links from breaking sometime after your next reboot.
If I say "here is a path that an app is allowed to use", flatpak should just allow an open() in there to work. It should not lie about the name of files in there. An app should be able to open a file there, remember that name, and count on being able to access it again in the future.
Other than that, Flatpaks are the bees knees. I love finding something I want to do, finding a solution in the flatpak store, and click-click I'm already doing shit. Finding Windows software is absolute garbage next to this.
@tet @linux Fundamentally, I'm just not interested in containerizing applications on my host computer. If I needed to do that, I'd use docker, so Flatpaks and such feel redundant.
I also don't like that distros like Ubuntu increasingly force snaps via apt, because it results in an unknown factor in case I ever need to troubleshoot.
AUR works for me best in cases when something isn't in the package manager. it's easier to make a custom aur package as opposed to a .deb
How does it stack up against traditional package management and others like AUR and Nix?
I only used AUR for a few packages (<5 at a time). It's to be avoided and only used if the other options are a massive pain (unless it's an official package).
Then I left Arch and eventually landed on MX. During that time Nix with home-manager has slowly replaced flatpak, and I don't even have it installed anymore. Nix is better in every way, except for ease of use.
Flatpak has great gui integration (for gui tools). You can click through everything, and the updates are unified. It usually works perfectly fine if you just need to install a few programs.
With nix, there's a lot more setup, but there are many benefits. You end up with a list of packages, and that's really useful because you can take a fresh install, install nix and home manager, and then run a single line to reinstall everything. You can rollback updates, pin specific versions, install packages from a repo (if it has a flake.nix with outputs), and also configure them. I'm using the unstable branch, and it's giving me bleeding edge packages on Debian. And there's no risk of outdated system libraries, like with flatpak, because it provides everything.
Flatpak is very nice. Flathub is very nice. Flathub’s developer documentation is shit covered shit.
I still prefer traditional packages, but I get why devs of complicated graphical apps with lots of dependencies hate them. As for Flatpak specifically, I'm not super impressed. It's just going to get more annoying over time having more old versions of all their libraries and more and more apps that aren't updating to the latest version so they eat up a ton of drive space and give constant notices to harass the devs, but out of all the major distro agnostic options they suck the least and they're getting better the fastest, which is why I think they've pretty much won at this point. I'm not currently using them, but it's pretty much inevitable that I'll have to at some point, and overall that's probably more good than bad. I think AppImages could have been better if the lead dev wasn't a walking, talking collection of weird hills to die on, but I'm afraid that ship has already sailed.
I'll always prefer the repositories, but Flatpak comes in handy for applications with weird dependencies where you need to compile everything needed on your own - or outdated 32 bits software.
good enough, still prefer the system package manager for most things though
purely as an end user i hate how much it downloads with each update and how much it uses the disk space although that's much less of an issue. i know it's solving a real problem and relieving a lot of the headaches of developers maintaing packages for each distro's specific package standard, but it's simply not the software distribution solution for people without at least well enough internet.
i wouldn't use any distro with flatpaks as its main way of delivering software and i would in almost all cases always choose alternatives even if it's outdated. i don't necessarily hate flatpak itself but for me i don't want to spend money on extra data cap and wait 30 minutes for a small update for my game launcher to finish.
the appimage of one of the applications i was interested in was 3 times less than the average flatpak update so redownloading the appimage every time would be better. if i installed more packages yeah the math would be better but it's still wasted data per update no matter how small it actually is. i found out after a while of using flatpak that i wouldn't just update and was stuck with outdated software anyway.
It's the easiest solution to packaging software for Linux that doesn't mean it's good, In fact fhe way no dependencies are shared absolutely wrecks my hard drive and makes everything super long (downloading, updating, etc...).
Where it shines is security but to be honest do you really need an open source app to be in it's own secure sandbox?
I vastly prefer nix and I wish packaging stuff for it was easier.
Haven’t had issues, elementary uses them for system apps
I really like them. They give us a reliable application that doesn't depend the distro building a version for specific platform. For example if the newest versions are compiled for Ubuntu 24.04 but you're on 22.04 it might take a while to get the update.
It does come at a cost though, it'll have to package all the dependencies for 24.04 in a layer of the package so it'll take a long time to start up and take a lot more memory than necessary.
This is mitigated by flatpaks using same base for their application (like Ubuntu with Electron) but it still isn't the same as just starting up a proper
aptprogram.I really like it since we can have a modern version of a program for small distros and in general the barrier to entry so much lower so companies can't just say "oh we can't support all Linux distros, not feasible".
Aur you compile yourself for your own distro instead of it being done already by
aptand the like.Nix is a super cool since you can just setup and configure pretty much everything so that you just press "install" and you'll have your Gimp, VPN and whatever apps all done for you. You'll have to do some heavy configuration so programming knowledge is not necessary but really helps.
I usually install Debian Linux on old Chromebooks that have only 16 GB SSD, and then gift them to my cousins or their kids. Flatpacks are out of the question, since pretty much every app I checked is between 500 and 1 GB of size. I only have 7.5 GB of free space in there after the base XFce Debian installation is done, plus 2 GB of swap. I find flatpacks to be space eaters, and I avoid them even on my normal, higher SSD size laptops.
Ambivalent. I like the consistency between distros and the idea of sandboxing, in practice sandboxing is a pain in the ass and Flatpaks use up an inordinate amount of space for different library versions. However, if I have to use a proprietary application I do appreciate the sandboxing and Flatpak is my preferred install method.
I usually prefer not to use them, but they flatpak for Prism Launcher comes with all versions of Java preinstalled which is convenient because I play verious versions of Minecraf, other than that I try to use xbps as much as possible
I'm a bit "eh" on flatpak. The only benefit I see is that it's sometimes more up-to-date than what I can get from an LTS package repository. As a heavy CLI user they force me to find and click icons which is irritating (yeah - I know about
flatpak run something.I.always.forgetbut that's even worse somehow).I've hit occasional issues with applications being too locked-down. Like with Darktable only being able to see things in $HOME/Pictures. But I keep my photography work in a different location so it can't see it. I had to jump through some odd hoops to fix that. Not a problem of flatpak itself per se but something you can expect when dealing with package makers.
I fall back on flatpak if the version available through the standard package manager is too out-of-date for my liking. Other than that I can't be bothered.
EDIT: Okay - for people who think they're being "helpful" by telling me that "aliases are a thing" just stop. I'm not going to workaround a broken system. I'm going to use another one that isn't broken (or less broken).
A lot of people seem to complain about them, but I really like them. I've even started using them over the AUR for some things now. I like that they keep certain things like Steam a lot tidier, and I like being able to see and control permissions and settings for everything all in Flatseal. The main downside I guess is that they use up more space by downloading dependencies for each app individually which is kind of redundant, but for me I've got a pretty big SSD in my laptop so it's never caused me any trouble. I could see how it could be a problem for someone with limited space on their system though.
Generally I tend to go Flatpak/AUR as a first choice, Appimage if I really need to, and Snaps never lol.
I wish more apps where officially supported, instead of saying it supports Linux and providing a .deb. Good thing the community provides unofficial flatpaks at least.
On the one hand I like the basic idea, on the other hand I think that some fundamental problems aren't fully solved yet. There big use case are passkeys and direct password manager integration – neither mesh well with the idea of software that isn't allowed to talk to most of the system.
I'm certain that this will be resolved at some point but for now I don't think Flatpak and its brethren are quite there yet.
AUR is similar to flathub in that most packages aren't thoroughly checked. Except for the packaging guidelines which usually have to be followed. I'm not sure how in depth nixpkgs or other distros check the source of packages of new maintainers.
Flatpak runs on all distros and supports sandboxing, which makes it a great addition to all distro repos. AUR can cause issues with dependencies and unmaintained packages, and the make file should be read since it's run with root privileges. Additionally the AUR only works on Arch Linux. Breakage isn't a risk with Nix and it's seamless rollback, but has to be installed deeply into the system (
/nix)My personally preferred package manager for most GUI apps is flatpak. Nix is great because it allows to install packages declaratively.
Edit: NixOS -> Nix
It's alright
My totally unscientific opinion (with a double-your-money-back guarantee!):
I'm not crazy about either Flatpak or Snap for that matter as there's so much backend baggage for both as well as certain hurdles regarding privileges and access to the file system (somebody please correct me if I'm wrong or working with dated information.)
My other completely prejudiced, unfounded bias against Flatpak is that it appears to have been adopted by RedHat as "the one true way," and what with IBM's/RedHat's behaviour anti-FOSS behaviour lately, plus I've almost always have been an
aptuser, I find it a pill hard to swallow.Me, say what you will about the security issues and its other flaws, but I like AppImage.
The problem with Flatpak is that for me I would only use it to sandbox propietary apps, and most of these are not officially supported, so there is almost always something broken, like screen sharing, etc.
I never ever will use a flatpak or snap or whatever "application". I'm using good old .deb package.
Mostly positive. My encoding utility Aviator can be shipped with a custom community-backed SVT-AV1 fork in the background without anyone noticing any issues like they would if I linked to system SVT-AV1. Flatpak makes this kind of thing easy, and users don't have to think about it.
Flatpaks are great. I install my core os and gui with the base package management. All my user side packages are Flatpaks. I then use Flatseal to lock down and modify Flatpaks as needed. What's great is running programs like wine without installing a ton of dependencies and then locking the install from parts of my computer I don't want it to have access to.
It is awesome
Everything I've gotten as a flatpak has been borked in one way or another. I only use it if there is literally no other option available.
I like it, it's good for desktop apps but I LOVEEEEEE nix, if there was a graphical box distro I think it would beat everything else out of the water. Full reproducible builds is not something to sneeze at
Flatpak is why i moved to Debian, Running a Stable OS with the latest packages have made my Linux Desktop a full replacement for Windows, MacOS and Rolling releases.
I like it but I would prefer it to be more restrictive out of the box. Such as have apps declare a list of urls the are permitted to contact , a browser could have * .
I'd like a more granular filesystem list too more akin to apparmors were each file path needed is explicitly defined, in some cases you would need a wildcard or a directory but for most apps this could be done.
What's not to Ike? These systems' development has been long overdue.
I didn’t want to containerize every installed app. Switched to Arch and don’t have to worry about it.
I think Flatpaks are great for applications like Firefox, Steam, etc. where dependencies or delay in package distribution due to building multiple versions can be a problem.
However, there are many situations where Flatpak's sandbox can be more detriment than helpful, if the application wasn't developed with that in mind. It's not a silver bullet for everything.
It's a decent packaging solution.
regarding the sandboxing, all the negatives are present with none of the benefits, wish they'd just rip that shit out
if you want to run software you don't trust, firejail it or get it's snap
It’s bloated. Not as bad as snap though. xbps for the win
Flatpak works most of the time. Nix works almost all the time (except when stuff happens like the download fails)
Flatpak is free to assume anything about your system which is sometimes not compatible with NixOS
I like them sonce they're easy to install and you can update all Flatpaks at once. But I don't likke the paths and run commands. Very unintuitive.
Thicchub
It's pretty good for desktop apps, but it doesn't provide CLI applications, so I still have to rely on the AUR. There are some issues with it, but overall I think it's the best solution we currently have. And it's very easy to use, which is great for new users and it will become important if Linux continues growing like this.
I love flatpaks and flathub. They're amazing for GUI apps, though there are still a couple of wrinkles that needs to be ironed out.
I would really love if it was better with regards to cli apps and developer tooling though. As someone that uses a lot of TUI apps that seriously limit how much I can use flatpak.
They’re great on certain desktops, like Fedora’s Atomic Desktops, but you usually have to work around Flatpak specific issues. On NixOS there doesn’t seem to be a declarative way to install them.
I click install, app launches and I don't need to deal with dependency hell for it. (I like them)
I dont use insecure tools to install software