197
What are your thoughts on Flatpak/Flathub?
(flathub.org)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
197 points (94.6% liked)
Linux
48366 readers
1321 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
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.
https://github.com/trytomakeyouprivate/flatalias
Try this script I wrote and help improve it!
if you want to change app permissions, use Flatseal and add the needed directory. This is very easy. If it is something all users generally need, open a bug on their repo.
Installing a separate program to make the first program work the way it should in the first place, and opening bugs in repos, is abolutely 100% things end users are willing to do.
KDE has flatpak settings included, GNOME is doing their thing with unix philosophy and all. Flatseal works fine.
As I said, you should not need to edit those settings, maybe you need to, and if it generally makes sense (for example GNUmeric only has documents access, nothing else) this needs to be fixed.
Will not happen often for common apps
Reminds me of this XKCD.
The state of flatpak permissions currently is like that. They can never read each others storage, much like on Android with
/storage/emulated/0/Android/data. So it you keep stuff stored inside these apps its safe.Until they can use portals, many have permissions to read/write everything
That has been fixed with the introduction of Portals: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/portal-api-reference.html