10mo ago

Is there a downside to Flatpak?

Basically title.

I’m wondering if a package manager like flatpak comes with any drawback or negatives. Since it just works on basically any distro. Why isn’t this just the default? It seems very convenient.

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166 comments

overly verbose way to launch them in terminal
can sometimess not even respect your gtk/qt theming
sandboxing/permission system can lead to you trying to figure out which directory you need to give access to when you want to save file if it wasn't preconfigured
uses its own libraries and not system libraries, want to play the hit new AAA game with steam flatpak? get fucked it requires a mesa commit that was merged 8 hours a go and you're stuck on 23.0.4 and can't use the git release.
Flatpak probably has it's specific uses like trying to use one piece of proprietary software that you don't trust and don't want to give it too much access to your system, or most GUI software clients having an easy way to install Discord on your Steam Deck (no terminal usage, Linux is easy yay), but native packages 99% of the time work better.
- uses its own libraries and not system libraries, want to play the hit new AAA game with steam flatpak? get fucked it requires a mesa commit that was merged 8 hours a go and you're stuck on 23.0.4 and can't use the git release.
  Can't you just install a git snapshot of mesa in a flatpak and use that? Then it'd be an upside
  
  The downside is having to do that manually. Kind of ruins the whole point of it. Flatpaks will remain out-dated until the maintainer has time to push it out. Forever behind.
  
  There's the org.freedesktop.Platform.GL{,32}.mesa-git runtime(?) so that seems wrong. What app always needs the latest snapshot mesa version anyway?
  
  According to the example, a hit new AAA title on steam might need it.
  
  That doesn't mean it constantly requires a mesa git snapshot.
  
  You can, infact there's outright a mesa git runtime one can add, i don't imagine too many systems roll so fast as to outpace it https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/available-runtimes.html

166 comments