1y ago

What has been your experience with Flatpak?

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?

141 comments

Flatpaks are great. I do wish flatseal was part of the flatpak standard. I want an android style permissions menu
- 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.
  
  KDE already does have the same thing in its settings
- I'd like to see permission pop ups so I know it wanted permission to do something and didn't have them, having to ask me. Sometimes it is explained that certain stuff the app does are blocked by the sandbox by default for security, but you can enable it, which is alright. Sometimes you'll just have to find that out for yourself.
  
  I wish it would be possible now but it probably won't happen until windows and mac will have similar features. The problem is that processes cannot just read a file, because in the container it doesn't exist. It's maybe due to permission. Maybe not. You cannot tell. Android apps are written in a way that they request access, while pc apps are just reading the files directly without requesting permission.
  So the app has to be written for flatpak. However, afaik, this is the maintainers goal too. Btw, the file open dialog is a currently working example of the dynamic permission handling. It's just that the app should use these features which is not guaranteed.
- I want an android style permissions menu
  Same. In addition to the prompt-based permissions that @Kusimulkku@lemm.ee brings up, I'd like to see more granular control of permissions. For example, a flatpak app's access to webcams, controllers, etc. are all controlled through just one permission: --device=all (aka "Device Access" in KDE's Flatpak Permission Settings).

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.
- Why not use a seperate /home partition if that's something you value?
  
  I do, that doesn't keep packages installed between distro reinstalls or swapping between entirely different distros. I'm talking about the actual packages and app data themselves that are contained in home.

I always use Flatpaks when available, I have been using it for about 1~2 years and honestly, I haven't found any issues that are deal breakers, mostly some missing storage permissions, but KDE makes this easy to deal with. I know some apps have some issues, but the biggest one that I had is that Steam Flatpak still requires Steam-Devices to be installed as a package, but that's more to do with the way Steam Input works.
The only issue that I have is that uninstalling Flatpaks should present an option to delete the app data.
- So how do you delete app data after uninstalling?
  And does uninstalling a flatpak app also uninstall flatpak dependencies that came with it?
  
  flatpak uninstall --delete-data example-package
  
  And does uninstalling a flatpak app also uninstall flatpak dependencies that came with it?
  from what I have seen, NO it does not do so automatically. there is a flatpak command option to clean out unused runtimes, and another to remove user data.
  delete app data after uninstalling?
  you either manually delete the data, or there's some flatpak command option, or you can use a tool such as warehouse which is available as a flatpak.
  other posts list the specific commands.
- If you install your flatpaks through the discover store it gives you an option to delete data whenever you uninstall
  
  Same on Gnome software
  But I guess I agree that it should prompt you when doing it through a TUI
- Check out Warehouse for deleting app data

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.
- I don't think the size thing is much of an issue these days outside of say IoT or very old computers. Absurd for say a single calculator app to be weighing like a gig or however much Gnome runtime is, but even in that situation it's not much of an actual problem imo. And once you install anything else using that same runtime, you in a way halved the size of that app.

Perfection. Debian + GNOME Software + Flatpak = Rock solid and clean OS with the latest software.
There are a few things that still need to be ironed out tho. For eg. communication between desktop apps and browser extensions such as this.
Another thing I would like to see is a decent and supported way to mirror flathub and/or have offline installations.
- That's what I'm running since yesterday. Bare-bones Debian (base system + Gnome shell) with all GUI apps installed from Flatpak.
- I managed to get the workaround working, but it's nowhere near optimal to have to do that. I hope they'll fix it
  
  What workaround specifically?

Never used them, maybe I'm old, but I only use app from the mx/debian repo. Everything is here and up-to-date. I prefer raw native.

I'm using official flatpak Firefox because I didn't want to wait any longer for Fedora releasing their rpm version of it. This way I get new releases right away and they are official as intended by Mozilla.
Not really a flatpak advantage, but a Firefox advantage.

What’s your long-term experience?
Excellent. After uninstalling it never comes back.

I prefer them. There’s trade-offs (like disk usage and occasional theme issues) but it’s worth it to me for the sandboxing and ability to easily run a newer version of an application than your distro has packaged up in their repos. It’s better for developers since they don’t have to support deb, rpm, etc. etc. And long term, it’ll allow immutable systems to become the default and that’ll be good for security and stability.
Between Snap, Flatpak, and AppImage, I default to Flatpak. It seems like the best supported even if they all have their strengths and weaknesses. AppImage is great for old versions of software you don’t want updated/integrated into menus. Snaps are basically the same and I happily use them if there’s no Flatpak but it’s so tied to Ubuntu/Canonical that some people have opinions about using it. I don’t know of any developer stubbornly refusing to support Flatpak on ideological grounds.

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.
- idk what type of drive you're using, but flatpak startup times are indistinguishable to me, when compared to native packages. And I've used flatpaks on A LOT of computers...
- Wdym by df pollution? That's the case with snap, not flatpak
- I see that fragmentation of runtimes is a problem. If all apps would simply use the same runtime, and a modern one, and there was a package manager that installs the missing dependencies, that would be nice.
  The diskspace is a true problem too, just because of the fragmented runtimes.
  But Distros are fragmented too. If simply everyone could unify, at least a bit, instead of at least 5 different big Distros competing, every app could just work. But thats not the case, so Flatpaks often work best, and maany packages are either only .deb, .rpm or even only on Arch
- 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.
- Just to provide counter examples, in arch I can't use the native steam package and play games with proton. It just doesn't work. I think proton expects some ubuntu libraries or something (found something like that while spending 5 hours debugging nfs heat). And even if I manage to fix it, next time I update the system it'll be broken again.
  I use flatpak, and everything just works.
  However, in arch if something is in the official repo or the AUR i prefer those.
  In ubuntu I installed krita and gmic, but it doesn't work. For some reason krita doesn't find the gmic executable. Instead of debugging krita and gmic for hours I just installed the flatpak version, and it just works.
  And yeah, app startup went from 5 to 7-10 seconds in krita, and from 1 to 2-3 seconds in firefox. It's not snap, it's 2023, we have SSDs.
  
  Really? I use Arch native Steam and Proton no problem. You either use steam-runtime (uses built in Ubuntu runtime) or steam-native (expects Arch packages) but there is a meta package for pulling the runtime deps. Both have worked for me.
  That said, Flatpak has come in clutch for me as well on the Steam Deck, and for things like Prism Launcher (modded Minecraft launcher) where you want to juggle multiple Java versions without needing to run archlinux-java between switching packs.

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

Seems like every flatpaks update has to redownload Nvidia drivers for each package which is like 500mb, and my download speed is 3mb/s on a good day. So flatpaks limit me to updating once a month
- You can pin the Nvidia driver with flatpak mask appname and update the rest of your apps.

ive had supprisingly little issues with flatpaks.
i have been running silverblue for about half a year now, and rely heavily on them.
i can remember 3 distinct issues:
vs code commandlines start in the sandbox, which needs a workarround (rather understandable)
either the fedora, or the flathub build of firefox didnt come with some video codec, OpenH264 i think. switching to the other build fixed it (imo more a licensing issue with the codec than a flatpak problem)
on rare occasions (about once every 3 month)
steam behaves weirdly, and refuses to start until i update the flatpak.
other than that, it has been a smoth ride.
- either the fedora, or the flathub build of firefox didnt come with some video codec, OpenH264 i think. switching to the other build fixed it (imo more a licensing issue with the codec than a flatpak problem)
  Just in case anyone in this thread also has problems with video playback on flathub Firefox, I just solved that by installing the ffmpeg-full flatpak.
  No idea why a dependency that is needed to play video without jitter isn't installed automatically.

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

Flatpaks have been amazing for me.
My home directory is a lot cleaner, dependency issues are a thing of the past, it's easier on the developers, I'm getting updates faster (not having to rely on distro maintainers), my installs are more portable than before.
I wish we had Android-like permission setting, where it pops up asking if each program can use X permission as it requests it.
And I wish Gnome settings would implement some of the more basic flatseal options (flatseal can still exist for power users), although that one isn't a shortcoming of flatpaks itself, it's more to do with development manpower on the Gnome side.
Overall I'm really glad that one of the biggest annoyances in Linux is getting resolved. We've finally pretty much agreed on an app distribution and packaging standard

My experience with flatpak has been stellar from a technical perspective has been stellar.
Where it currently falls short for me personally is trust. With my distro I am putting my trust into the maintainers, but with flatpak its... random people for most apps?
It is tough when it is not a primary channel of distribution for most devs, but I am optimistic that will change in the future.
- It's sandboxed though. Running an app from a developer already implies trust on your part. So if it's sandboxed away from your other stuff, what's the issue?
  
  Sandboxed just means an app can't reach out to the rest of the OS. What about the information I am entrusting to it to process?
  If my browser is a flatpak, it likely has access to most of the information I care about. If I am using a chat app that is a flatpak, it can read my most personal communications. Why do I care if it can read what is in /etc?
  Relevant: https://xkcd.com/1200/
  Running an app from a developer already implies trust on your part.
  You totally missed my point. My point was that a lot of flatpaks are packaged by unknown third parties. I would love it if the devs would package things as flatpaks directly, but that is mostly not the case.
  Looking at flathub right now. 1567 applications are from unverified publishers vs 789 verified. Unverified apps include chrome, edge, chromium, brave, BITWARDEN and signal. All of those applications process highly sensitive information.

It's great if the pak meets your needs. For Steam the pak didn't meet my needs because it doesn't allow you to add additional library locations. As long as it's set up in a way that works for you then it's a big time saver.
- I haven't tried it but doesn't flatseal let you setup steam's permissions to allow external/additional directories or mounts?
  What's stopping steam's access to other directories?
  
  Ah, I haven't heard of flatseal before.
  
  The trick is knowing how to do it. I still haven't fixed my Zoom install to successfully download emojis (which I suspect requires a filesystem permission it doesn't have by default)...
  
  It works when set up with flatseal.

Great. Works on anything without any issues. I use it for pretty much everything (except web browser and only because I don't wanna bother with permissions on that)... As for the size argument, I have also never had isssues with space, my laptop has 128GB of storage total and the /home partition on my desktop is ~100GB, both use fllatpaks for pretty much everything, I have no issues with space on either... And yes I use flatpaks on gentoo, cry about it.

It's been great. I can get updated stuff on top of stable point release distro without mixing repos. Offers nice features like sandbox and forcing everything under .var for easy transfer to another machine.
There's some small issues. For some apps fonts look weird but it's fixable. Firefox is so sandboxed that KeepAssXC and KDE Connect/plasme browser integration has harder time with it. Managed to fix XC. Sometimes there's issues with permissions. Well most those things were issues with permissions as in with the sandbox. But I think those issues will be settled at some point.

i like using bottles & steam flatpaks on debian because they use newer mesa in their containers. so the best of both worlds with stable debian but more updated gaming drivers
- This is the setup for me too. It's been fantastic
- Similar reason, with flatpaks having codecs with them so no need for outside the distro codec repo. (Talking about openSUSE here but might be the same for Fedora)
- slight correction: flatpak doesn't run apps in a container
  
  Since it supports OCI images, and uses some of the same sandboxing tech I'd say there is a blurred line here for sure.

Aside from philosophical issues my experience with Flatpak has been excellent. There's some theming steps you need to do to make them feel like regular apps, which I feel is clunky design. No Flatpak-induced instability from what I can tell. Setting up directory permissions is sometimes slightly annoying but Flatseal makes it trivial, and most Flatpak permissions are set up properly out of the box these days.
I haven't noticed any start-time delays when launching Flatpaks as opposed to regular apps - I don't know if they've fixed that or if my system is just too powerful. The only app that I've personally noticed is weird is VSCodium, which has trouble escalating to admin permissions when you're trying to edit privileged files. I still use the regular version for that reason.
- I haven’t noticed any start-time delays when launching Flatpaks as opposed to regular apps
  OPs case sounds like it's distro-specific, rather than Flatpak specific. Flatpaks don't do the Snap thing that bloats start time

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.
- 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

It's pretty nice on my steamdeck no issues to report. I prefer a nice Deb package but on the deck flatpaks get preserved over upgrades.

I am not terribly impressed. The ability to build and run apps in a well defined and portable sandbox environment is nice. But everything else is kind of terrible. Seemingly simple things like having a package that contains multiple binaries aren't properly supported. There are no LTS runtimes, so you'll have to update your packages every couple of months anyway or users will get scary errors due to obsolete runtimes. No way to run a flatpak without installing. Terrible DNS based naming scheme. Dependency resolving requires too much manual intervention. Too much magic behind the scene that makes it hard to tell what is going on (e.g. ostree). No support for dependency other than the three available runtimes and thus terrible granularity (e.g. can't have a Qt app without pulling in all KDE stuff).
Basically it feels like one step forward (portable packages) and three steps back (losing everything else you learned to love about package managers). It feels like it was build to solve the problems of packaging proprietary apps while contributing little to the Free Software world.
I am sticking with Nix, which feels way closer to what I expect from a Free Software package manager (e.g. it can do nix run github:user/project?ref=v0.1.0).

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

I used it once, as a last resort when I wanted to try some program that had a ridiculous set of build dependencies that was just too much. It was okay, I guess.

I really like AppImage, but so far my experiences with flatpak have all been pretty terrible.

Flatpaks saved my bacon when I borked my Linux work computer and didn't have time to fix it. Spent 2 months with half my apps on Flatpak because the native ones weren't working.
It's also great as a developer. While I do provide x86 and arm binaries, I don't bother distributing them in 20 different formats. The website links to Flathub, and the number of distro/Mesa specific issues has dropped to 0.
Edit: Also see- Pros of Using Flatpak

When it works if works pretty well. When it don't it's a pain in the ass

I use Flatpaks (on Arch btw) whenever possible. My only issues are some apps can be difficult to work with if they require external programs (like VS Code with Docker, or Ardour with plugins), and how slow updating is (I feel like I'm updating the KDE or nVidia dependencies every day, and it takes several minutes, when pacman can download and install several gigabytes of packages in 30s).

I absolutely love it. Easy to find newer versions of things than what's in my distro's repos, easy to update. The only snags I've encountered is sometimes (very rarely) a program won't have access to part of my storage or my system's dark theme isn't applied. The former is super rare and the latter is usually 5min of searching the web to remember how to change the theme for a flatpak.
EDIT: after reading some of the other comments, I should mention that I only use it for GUI applications. I've not yet tried any TUI/CLI applications as flatpaks.

I use it on my pi400 running rpios Bookworm. Easier to install things like Okular and other apps without installing all of the overhead of KDE/Gnome. Counting the necessary kde/gnome libs I currently have 33 flatpaks installed.

My experience with flatpaks has been mostly good. I tend to opt more towards .deb based apps, with flatpak being a fallback option. With that being said, the Pycharm Pro and Spyder flatpaks don’t run well at all on my system, with Pycharm being too heavy, and Spyder crashing due to Kvantum incompatibility.

Really my only complaint is that updating them is kinda wonky. I have to run the command multiple times to get them all updated. I'll get cryptic error messages and then just have to run it again and again until it goes through.

Mostly okay. My only annoyance is setting up electron apps to use Wayland.

it's my preference for proprietary apps

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...
- I really wish I had a proper portal interface that put a cli tools in my path and asked me if I'm sure I want to give the tool permission to that path (you know because of filesystem separation, obviously don't ask if it's already given that permission).
  Basically I agree, flatpaks shell interactions are sub par.

I had heroic games launcher as a flatpak and my FPS was 33% lower than a native install of heroic

Used it once.. it's as annoying as shit since you can't just run apps you have to type 'flatpack run org.mozilla.firefox' instead of just typing 'firefox' (and I had to google that because I just can't remember the sequence). Also for some reason it's slow.. as you mentioned a 1 second delay before anything works. I can't see myself using it again.
- As a local fix, you could set up an alias. Open .bashrc and add the following line: alias firefox="flatpak run org.mozilla.firefox"
  
  So now you have to do that every time you install a flatpak.
  Or just stick to a normal package manager, that does all that for you.

Why flatpak when I have apt/.deb? I never needed, at all, any flatpaks

The only problem I've encounter was the steam client not recognising my controller and then I've decided to install steam non-flatpak.

Screwed up fonts in GTK software, even though the xdg-portal app for KDE is installed. At some point I just gave up. I see no reason to install any Flatpak if the software in question is already in the distro's repository and current enough anyway. Maybe except OBS, because the Flatpak version comes with Youtube integration which, to my understanding, needs to remain closed source and won't make it into a FOSS repository.
- I take it you're on Wayland? The fonts issue is a bug that's being fixed IIRC in KDE's portal, but as a workaround for now you can install the GTK desktop portal, which should make the fonts render correctly.
  (That is, if you end up needing to use other Flatpaks that have an OBS-like situation)

It's fine. No real crash/stability issues on the flatpaks I've installed. The real downsides are that, yeah, some apps don't integrate well with the rest of the system either in some functions or theming, due to the sandboxing, and if an app has many or large dependencies it can take up a lot of space compared to a native/repo app and you also may then have more than one copy of those dependencies on your system. That doesn't usually cause conflicts (a positive side of sandboxing), but it may be a problem on smaller storage devices if you use a lot of flatpaks or need other large apps installed.

I have made very good experience with Steam installed from flatpak. Only my loved browser "qutebrowser" seems to be abandoned in the flathub-repo. It takes so much time to compile it on Gentoo, so flatpak is a very good fallback for programs with painful compile times.

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.

I am on MicroOS-based distro, so all my GUI applications are from Flatpak. I don’t see any difference from more traditional distro, it just works.

Absolutely fucking awful. I’ve had issues with every one I’ve used.
Been trying to move to silverblue/ublue/sericia.
Firefox comes out of the box as both a system package and a flatpak. The flatpak does WebGL stuff fine, but video is broken; the system package does video, but webgl is broken.
Boxes was the first app I had needed to open a file with, and every time I need to, I have to restart some systemd portal service first. And there’s no guest to host audio.
I always had this problem with Inkscape on standard fedora where the icons on the layers menu would be corrupted. Wasn’t so on my first use of it with flatpak. Great! But subsequent runs the issue returned.
Discord worked fine for a few weeks. Then it started crashing on launch. A bit of googling and installing an old MESA platform flatpak had the problem resolved… for a day.
The only flatpak that has worked without a hitch has been Spotify.
Everything is so different, I have no idea how to debug this shit. And even then, I’m not 15 with unlimited time and zero dollars any more. I don’t have the time to spend 5 hours working out why my image editors icons are wrong.
Having a one-stop distribution-agnostic repository where it’s easy to install software devops-style is a win. (Setting up custom repos, or installing the latest rpm every week (looking at you discord) can be a pain). Buuut I’m not convinced.

I started on Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora. Native apps where often horrible. I remember SciDavis for Ubuntu being completely broken, Libreoffice for Fedora, and Flatpak just worked.
Officially supported Flatpaks are great, a bit like the Windows way but better, as they are reviewed, containerized and in an actual repository.
But flatpakking random apps isnt that easy, but I really want to learn it. Especially an easy semi-automatic way of converting Appimages (may they burn in hell) to Flatpaks. Like BalenaEtcher and so many more.
Also, Flatpaks are not secure in the case of biig projects. Nearly all the known Linux apps like Libreoffice, Gimp, Inkscape etc are unisolated. And trying to specify the permissions (only home and all the mounts, instead of your entire root partition) gives you "they are insecure anyways and should get portals" and your PRs closed.
So they are in a very incomplete state currently, and you need to manually secure them to be actually kinda protected. But without Portals, entire home access is not actually isolated.
Also, try and use the --verified repo:
undefined

flatpak remote-add --subset=verified flathub-verified https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
Problem here is that many apps like VLC, that work great, are not yet adopted by upstream, so the verified repo is not really usable currently.
And native messaging (keepassxc-browser, etc.) and other things are not always working. Drag&drop is, for some reason, but not in Firefox, maybe there are different ways.

They take a lot of space but the advantages you get are amazing, VScodium broke again this week, I could just rollback to the commit that worked with no issues. I can install apps I don't trust and not give them any permission over my filesystem. And best of all: it works on any distro so I know my setup is reproducible easily.

Great. I like being able to deny apps permission to my home folder with a simple flick via Flatseal. Only issue I have with it is the slow update times, flathub seriously need to get more mirrors.

They don't seem to play nice with autostart, on kde at least. Updates sometimes need to retry a couple of times. Other than that no problems on my end. I'm using a read only root fedora spin and mainly distrobox-export apps on arch for anything missing, or rpm-ostree for the odd thing I need to start at boot.

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