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?

  • Smokeydope@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    Its quick and easy to install a flatpak which is the latest stable which is a godsend when the versions available through package manager are years out of date. Not everyone can compile from source or add an additional source repo. My only big issue is how bloated flatpaks are size wise and where stuff gets installed in my file system.

  • DrRatso@lemmy.ml
    2·
    11 months ago

    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.

  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

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

    • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
      0·
      11 months ago

      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.

  • CuriousTommy@discuss.online
    1·
    11 months ago

    Generally speaking, it has been a great experience for most apps I use. The only exception is Steam, it runs well, but sometimes I run into a few issues.

    • This might be due to me using an NVIDIA GPU, but after I do a graphics update, my game (Team Fortress 2) doesn’t launch until I reset Steam.
    • I like joining a third party MvM servers through the website (potato.tf), sometimes joining the game causes a second instance of Steam to launch for some reason…
  • mFat@lemdro.idEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

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

  • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    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.

  • Churbleyimyam@lemm.ee
    1·
    11 months ago

    I’ve gone back to using packages from my repo. I was all-in with flatpaks for a while because they tend to be more up to date than my distro’s packages and I liked the idea of the sandboxing but in practice I’ve found it a nuisance getting applications to speak to each other and I don’t like all the redundant code bloating my internal drive. The thing that really did it for me though was the other day when I had to restore my system from a Timeshift backup. It took an hour and a half to restore a recent backup, with well over 90% of that time showing as flatpak stuff.

  • stella@lemm.ee
    1·
    11 months ago

    Good for software that isn’t available any other way.

    I never use flatpaks if something is available in the Manjaro repository or AUR.

  • zoey@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Don’t really see the point of installing a whole other package manager, personally. If its not in the repos or AUR, I’ll just compile from source.

  • MeowWeHaveAProblem@toast.oooEnglish
    0·
    11 months ago

    Two issues I have with them.

    First the size. Being on a poor internet connection makes downloading them painful. Some apps are 200MB for the apt or a flatpak install 1.5GB! Also doesn’t help with disk space.

    Second I often have issues saving files. Some apps use non standard folder location and some still save them to the non standard location even when you select one of you own. Block bench was bad. I’m not sure what causes this, if it wasn’t for the size I would probably spend more time looking for a fix.

    • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
      1·
      11 months ago

      Some apps are 200MB for the apt or a flatpak install 1.5GB! Also doesn’t help with disk space.

      Flatpak also installs dependencies, which are shared across Flatpak apps - So yea, the initial download sucks, but native apps actually do the same thing (you just already have the dependencies downloaded).

      Also for disk space - If your fs has compression by default, a lot of it gets saved

      Second I often have issues saving files

      File a bug report upstream on a per-app basis

  • I_like_cats@lemmy.one
    0·
    11 months ago

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

  • treadful@lemmy.zipEnglish
    01·
    11 months ago

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

    • jack@monero.town
      1·
      11 months ago

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

  • crispy_kilt@feddit.de
    01·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • przmk@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      11 months ago

      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.

  • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
    01·
    11 months ago

    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…