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this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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/var/lib/flatpak/app/org.gnu.emacs/current/active/export/bin/org.gnu.emacsis not what I expect a Unix system to want me to type if I want to run Emacs. Nor isflatpak run org.gnu.emacs. These are tools built by someone whose mental model of running Unix software is "click the icon in the Gnome launcher". That's one aspect what I'm describing as not being "simple". I don't want my mental model of how to run Unix software to include "remember how you installed it and then also remember the arbitrary reverse-FQDN-ish string you need to use to tell flatpak to run it". If I'm honest, that alone is sufficient to signal it wasn't built for me. I could work around it for sure with shell aliases, but I could also just not use it, and that seems fine for me.This. Having to open a console to run a flatpak in bspwm is annoying as all hell. PWA's are just as bad, I ended up writing a script I could run from dmenu:
I agree that launching flatpaks outside of a GUI is stupidly verbose. I certainly would never use flatpak for cli tools, and I think that is a problem for it. I would love to see more tools bundled up that way, but flatpak is far from the solution. And Docker has the same or bigger problems.
And in a way, everything is a CLI tool on most normal systems. Evince or Acroread or whatever you prefer to read PDFs is not "a CLI tool", but if I want to use LaTeX to create a document, I want to be able to do something like
I don't want to have to build my document, bring up my app launcher, click on the Evince icon, hit Ctrl-O, navigate to my pdf file, and double click it.
That is a great point. I use the shortcut 'code .' to launch VSCode when I'm on the terminal a lot. Can't do that with flatpak without an alias. I don't live on the terminal though, so it is rarely an issue for me. It is a problem flatpak should solve though. Seems like they are focused on GUI apps and GUI launching.