Flatpak is supposed to "just work" everywhere.

The real thing that Flatpak offers is one place to publish for Linux. You put your app in the App Store for Apple, you put it in the Play Store for Android, you put it in Flathub for Linux.

Maybe but probably not. People that develop applications can save a major headache by choosing flatpaks so the ecosystem will gravitate towards it.

At some point new applications that didn't launch a Linux version will do so but only on flatpak and older applications will start moving towards flatpaks since it's less dev time.

It looks to me as inevitable that the best versions of an app will be a flatpak but if you're on Ubuntu based system you can probably get by for very long without them.

If there is nothing appealing on flatpak, then sure. But for me it was really appealing and I still ignored it because you need to download big files at the beggining. But later on i started using it for steam and all because that thing is better staying as user-installed files in some form of permission sandbox

So far I have also completely ignored them. From what I understand they technically allow you to install old versions of software, potentially having multiple at the same time. This could come in a clutch when working with stuff like Godot or Blender where constantly upgrading to the latest version would cause issues on bigger projects. This is the only thing I can see myself using them for, at least in the near future.

This is what's so great about Linux, you can use whatever the hell you want.

Flatpaks provide some cool security functionalities like revoking network access to a specific application. Maybe you care about this, maybe you don't.

My personal policy is to always install from the repos. Occasionally something is only available in flathub, which is fine for me. I really understand how hard is maintaining something for every single package manager and diatributions and totally respect the devs using a format that just works everywhere. If I were to release a new Linux app, I would totally use flatpak.

As someone who develops and distributes a small application exclusively on Flathub, I prefer that everyone uses the exact same package on every system. That way I know that if something doesn't work, the issue should be easy to reproduce.

Recently, there was a situation where a user indicated in the comments of a release announcement that a newly introduced feature “doesn't work”. It turned out that they installed a third-party package from the AUR (that wasn't updated yet) without knowing that this isn't the official and up to date version.

Yes. You can always build from source; If need be

Downsides of distro pacakges:

• someone needs to package an application for each distro
• applications often need to maintain support for multiple versions of some of their dependencies to be able to continue to work on multiple distros
• users of different distros use different versions of the application, creating more support work for upstream
• users of some distros can't use the application at all because there is no package
• adding 3rd party package repos is dangerous; every package effectively gets root access, and in many cases every repo has the ability to replace any distro-provided package by including one with a higher version number. 3rd party repos bring the possibility of breaking your system through malice or incompetence.

Downsides of flatpak:

• application maintainers are responsible for shipping and updating their dependencies, and may be less competent at doing timely security updates than distro security teams
• more disk space is used by applications potentially bringing their own copies of the same dependencies

🤔

You're just not the target user.

The whole OCI mindset is geared towards absolute noobs like me, and cloud native devs that develop inside containers on a daily basis.

Take me for example. I use Bazzite, it's the first distro I couldn't break. On top of that, flatpaks, appimages and brew are my only options for software. Since Bazzite is an atomic distro (think immutable ) I could also use Distrobox but I don't want to deal with it.

Everything just works for me, I don't care about anything. I broke so many distros before. Sure, I don't control every nut and cranny but I don't want to.

If you know how to not break your stuff then that's great, but I don't, and I don't want to learn that. I just want to learn other things.

Sure you can! Just run alias flatpak=snap and you'll be golden.

(I'll show myself out...)

Yes. Yes you can.

Ignore it. Move on.

I might be an exception here, but I really like flatpaks. I like their sandboxed nature and using Flatseal, you can cherry pick the permissions you want to give to a flatpak application. Don't want to give n/w access, boom done, like that. And finally if anything goes wrong, delete the app data and you are fresh to go. Also from a security standpoint, you can grand or deny access to specific directories and most apps don't have root access.

I don't develop distributed applications, but Im not understanding how it simplifies dependency management. Isn't it just shifting the work into the app bundle? Stuff still has to be updated or replaced all the time, right?

That's correct. This simplifies the dependency management system because not every distribution ships with every version of every package, so when software requires a version of a package that the distro dosesn't ship with or have in its repositories, the end user has to either build the package from source, or find some other way to run their software. Flatpaks developers will define the versions of dependencies that are required for an application to run and that exact version is pulled in when the flatpak is installed. This makes the issue of every distro not having every version of every package moot.

Don't maintainers have to release new bundles if they contain dependencies with vulnerabilities?

They don't have to, no. But they absolutely should.

Is it because developers are often using dependencies that are ahead of release versions?

Sometimes, yes. Or the software is using a dependency that is so old that it's no longer included in a distro's package repositories.

Also, how is it so much better than images for your applications on Docker Hub?

I would say they're suited to different purposes.

Docker shines when availability is a concern and replication is desired. It's fantastic for running a swarm of applications spread across multiple machines automatically managing their lifecycles based on load. In general though, I wouldn't use Docker containers to run graphical applications. Most images are not suited for this by default, and would require you install a bunch of additional packages before you could consider running any graphical apps. Solutions to run graphical applications in Docker do exist (see x11docker), but it doesn't really seem like a common practice.

Flatpaks are designed to integrate into an existing desktops that already have a graphical environment running. Some flatpaks include the packages required for hardware acceleration (Steam, OBS) which can eliminate the need for those packages to be available via your distro's package manager.

What this means is that a distro like Alpine Linux that doesn't have an nvidia package in its repos can still run Steam because the Steam flatpak includes the nvidia driver if you have an nvidia GPU installed.

Never say never, I guess, but nothing about flatpak really appeals to my instincts. I really just want to know if it's something I should adopt, or if I can continue to blissfully ignore.

¯_(ツ)_/¯ It's a tool. Use it when it's useful, or don't.

Is it because developers are often using dependencies that are ahead of release versions?

That has been my experience recently. I had the same mindset as you until a critical piece of software I use shat the bed on Arch (LiveCaptions) that affected my being able to watch training videos for work.

Because it was time critical and I didn’t feel like possibly breaking other things for one package, I grabbed the flatpak. It came with its own nvidia driver package (mine was newer) and it worked out of the box without having to mess with anything and that was enough to change my hardline view on that.

Now it’s just another tool to use in an emergency when important things randomly break.

Personally it depends on distro and package manager.
If your on arch yes you can in a easyish way some aur packages may require you to compile it.
Other distros you can either compile the software from source or convert .deb to .rpm (for example) this is mediumish and takes time to do.

Adopt nix and you will be able to ignore it forever! 😉

Seriously though, as others have said, use whatever fits you best. I avoided snaps and flatpaks due to the increased size requirements. So many things were duplicated for no apparent benefit (to me). However, with their introduction of permissions and portals, it does seem like a safer option. Although, we're in a phase right now where not everything is flatpakked and applications trying to talk to each other is a pain (keepassxc unable to talk to flatpak ~~firefox~~ librewolf, chromium, etc.).

Now that I use nix, I have a whole bunch of other problems, but at least getting packages is quite low on the list.

Anti Commercial-AI license

Can I ignore flatpak indefinitely?

Sure, at least until software you want to use is flatpak only, e.g. Bottles

I personally like flatpak and its build system. Flatpak applications are sandboxed by default and don't require root during any part of installation, reducing the risk of malicious/broken software damaging the host. They also are available for basically any base distro, meaning i can use the same apps if a ever distrohop and i can even just copy over the config folders as if nothing happened.

Just as my two cents, as a user - I like flatpaks because I can have up to date versions of certain applications on a more stable Debian base. I also like that application configs all go in one spot (~/.var/app/com.Example.example), and having granular permissions management per application. As for immutable distros, I'd happily use one if I wasn't already getting all the stability I need from LMDE :)

it comes down to how you use your system. if you're fine using is as described and you're on a distro that gets newest versions, keep on truckin'.

for me, I hate rebooting. I like to leave my system and return to it, be it laptop or desktop, and continue where I left off. sometimes that goes on for days, sometimes weeks. that's virtually impossible when updating both system and app stuff constantly, i.e. to get new apps you also get new kernel, mesa, plasma, whathaveyous.

so I keep my system stuff that's handled with the package manager and my app stuff separate. almost all of my GUI apps are flatpak and they are on a systemd timer so they get updated daily. my systems don't bother me with update alerts, don't do shit in the background and that's how I like it. once a month or so I do a system upgrade and reboot.

Just use Nix. It can run all the packages on whatever platform. It has the largest repository of software & are some of the most up-to-date.

Yes you can. I do. If a software does not offer build instructions, which is rare, I just do not use it.