Fan of Flatpaks ...or Not?

?? I manage flatpaks exclusively in the terminal

My favorite part of the linux experience is the FREEDOM, but also being talked down to for not using my freedom correctly, I should only do things a specific way or I might as well just use windows.
- It’s extremely context-dependent.
  If we’re talking about enterprise-grade, five-nines reliability: I want the absolute simplest, bare-bones, stripped down, optimized infra I can get my hands on.
  If we’re talking about my homelab or whatever else non-critical system: I’m gonna fuck around and play with whatever I feel like.
- Because using your freedom to promote options that restrict freedom means helping to remove your freedom. But hey, what do the Linux elders know? Clearly the new people into Linux are far smarter...
- You don't have to do as they say but doing so lets you talk down to others who aren't. So it's a fair trade.
- You are mixing different ideas of freedom. Software freedom is not the same as freedom of choice of software.
  You don't need Linux to have choices of what software to use, you have that in most (all?) proprietary systems, in some you might even have more choices than in Linux.. even if it includes proprietary software.
  This is analogous to how being a free person (not a slave) is not the same as having freedom to choose who to work for, even if some of them are slavers (ie. having freedom to choose your master).

Flatpaks are good, especially compared to snap.
The future is atomic OS's like silverblue, which will make heavy use of things like flatpak.
- Having nails driven into my testicles is better than snap. It's not a high bar.
  
  Haven't had much opportunity to use snap, what's the problem with them?
- Atomic distros are cool, and I'm sure they will only get more popular, but I don't buy the idea that they're "The" future. They have their place, but they can't really completely replace traditional distros. Not every new thing needs to kill everything that came before it.
  
  They have their place, but they can’t really completely replace traditional distros.
  As it stands, I kinda agree. But I truly wonder to what extent we might be able to close the current gap.
- This Snap comparison is the soft bigotry of low expectations
- Immutable OSes are difficult to use for coding or other tasks that include installing many terminal utilities and for that reason, I don't recommend them and certainly don't want them to be the future of Linux distros. And if I'm going to create a container running a different distro to install and run the apps I want to use, then I may as well use that distro on my host.
  
  You just move to user directory installation of most tools via brew on Linux. It's not difficult. The Bazzite distro handles all this incredibly well via brew, flatpaks, and distrobox.
- Snap is not all bad if you're on a Ubuntu based distro, I just don't like the way it's pushed and that it comes from Ubuntu mostly. Startup time is a major issue for me also, but all in all it works.
  I'm still sitting on the fence, heavily prefer flatpak but when Ubuntu is going to package nvidia drivers in a snap it's a thing I'm up for trying.
  My understanding is that if I'm on Ubuntu and the snap uses the same underlying Ubuntu version as my distro it should be fast but I haven't seen it.

I love installing things from the CLI and prefer to only do it that way but Linux needs a single click install method for applications if it’s ever going to become a mainstream OS. The average person just wants to Google a program, hit download and install. If not that then they want to use a mobile-like App Store.
Flatpak is kind of perfect at achieving both those things
- There have been GUI package managers for decades.
  
  Oh 100% but have you tried to explain how to use one to a computer novice? Like yes, the answer is usually “they should just…” but novice users will never. With flatpak, they get an experience similar to how MacOS works and a bit like how .exes work and it Just Works™️
  Edit: like I’ve had trouble showing people how to use the GNOME App Store which could not be any more simple. Anyone who has been convinced to install Linux already feels way out of their element so making everything feel as natural as possible is essential (and I mean, flatpaks are awesome anyway)
- OpenSUSE has OneClick install for RPMs. https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:One_Click_Install
  Edit: and if you happen to download an rpm, you just double click it in the filemanager (or single click if that is your setting) and it launces the install GUI.
  Its similar to how MSI file install looks...just next next finish kind of thing
  
  For sure and I agree that should be enough but the average person is not good with computers and they don’t want to learn. They won’t understand the nuances of different distributions of Linux. Like try explaining the difference between a .deb, a .tar.gz, and a .rpm to a person who’s already hésitent about using Linux. Flatpak solves that by just having one download that any Linux install can use

I've never heard anyone say that Flatpaks could result in losing access to the terminal.
My only problem with Flatpaks are the lack of digital signature, neither from the repository nor the uploader. Other major package managers do use digital signatures, and Flatpaks should too.
- Nah, it's the same as with systemd, docker, immutable distros etc. Some people just don't appreciate the added complexity for features they don't need/use and prefer to opt out. Then the advocates come, take not using their favorite software as a personal insult and make up straw-men to ridicule and argue against. Then the less enlightened of those opting out will get defensive and let themselves get dragged into the argument. 90% that's the way these flame wars get started and not the other way around.
  For the record, I use flatpak on all my desktops, it's great, and all of the other mentioned things in some capacity, but I get why someone might want to not use them. Let's not make software choice a tribalism thing please. Love thy neighbor as thyself, unless they use Windows, in which case, kill the bastard. /s
- I was just wondering the connection between flatpaks and the terminal because I’ve never heard of flatpaks before and Wikipedia says they’re a sandboxed package management system or something?
  
  As someone who uses Flatpak you can still use the terminal to install, uninstall and do maintenance, not sure why people believe terminal is useless with Flatpak 😞
  Flatpaks are containers, same as Snaps, I personally prefer Flatpaks over Snaps, but just my personal choice. I use Flatsweep and Flatseal apps to help administrate Flatpak apps, but use terminal as well 🙂

About the image: The joke's on you, I install my flatpaks via the terminal.
I've started using flatpaks more after starting using Bazzite and I liked them more than I expected. As a dev, I still need my work tools to be native, but most of my other needs are well covered by flatpaks.
Tip: Flatseal is a great config manager for flatpaks' permissions.
- Installing flatpaks via the terminal is so much faster for some reason, so I always do it that way.
- I installed flatseal but I never understand what is essential and what is not.
  
  It is mostly trial and error. I use it mostly to set envvars.
  As an example, I add the ~/.themes folder and the GTK_THEME to allow some apps to get the themes I downloaded.
- My guess was the point is that it's difficult to install CLI tools using Flatpak
  
  Installing them is not difficult. It's the same as any other flatpak.
  The problem is when running them (actually, when running any flatpak, not just CLI tools) you need to type out the whole backwards domain thingy that flatpaks use as identifier, instead of having a proper typical and simple executable name like they would have if they were installed normally.
  I end up adding either symlinks or aliases for all my flatpaks because of this reason. After doing that it's ok.. but it's just an extra step that's annoying and that the flatpak devs have no interest on fixing apparently.

Certainly a fan, and I don't understand the hate towards it.
Flatpaks are my preferred way of installing Linux apps, unless it is a system package, or something that genuinely requires extensive permissions like a VPN client, or something many other apps depend on like Wine.
The commonly cited issues with Flatpaks are:
Performance. Honestly, do you even care if your Pomodoro timer app takes up 1 more megabyte of RAM? Do you actually notice?
Bloat. Oh, yes, an app now takes 20 MB instead of 10 MB. Again, does anybody care?
Slower and larger updates. Could be an issue for someone on a metered traffic, or with very little time to do updates. Flatpaks update in the background, though, and you typically won't notice the difference unless you need something newest now (in which case you'll have to wait an extra minute)
Having to check permissions. This is a feature, not a bug. For common proponents of privacy and security, Linuxheads grew insanely comfortable granting literally every maintainer full access to their system. Flatpaks intentionally limit apps functionality to what is allowed, and if in some case defaults aren't good for your use case - just toggle a switch in Flatseal, c'mon, you don't need any expertise to change it.
What you gain for it? Everything.
Full control over app's permissions. Your mail client doesn't need full system permissions, and neither do your messengers. Hell, even your backup client only needs to access what it backs up.
All dependencies built in. You'll never have to face dependency hell, ever, no matter what. And you can be absolutely sure the app is fully featured and you won't have to look for missing nonessential dependencies.
Fully distro-agnostic. If something works on my EndeavourOS, it will work on my OpenSUSE Slowroll, and on my Debian 12. And it will be exactly the same thing, same version, same features. It's beautiful.
Stability. Flatpaks are sandboxed, so they don't affect your system and cannot harm it in any way. This is why immutable distros feature Flatpaks as the main application source. Using them with mutable distributions will also greatly enhance stability.
Alternatives?
AppImages don't need an installation, so they are nice to see what the program is about. But for other uses, they are garbage-tier. Somehow they manage both not to integrate with the system and not be sandboxed, you need manual intervention or additional tools to at least update them/add to application menu, and ultimately, they depend on one file somewhere. This is extremely unreliable and one should likely never use AppImages for anything but "use and delete".
Snaps...aside from all the controversy about Snap Store being proprietary and Ubuntu shoving snaps down people's throats, they were just never originally developed with desktop applications in mind. As a result, Snaps are commonly so much slower and bulkier that it actually starts getting very noticeable. Permissions are also way less detailed, meaning you can't set apps up with minimum permissions for your use case.
This all leaves us with one King:
And it is Flatpak.
- I've been working on Linux for 15 years now and I perfectly remember the origin of many concepts. If you look at it through time, what would it be like:
  We can build applications with external dependencies or a single binary, what should we choose?
  The community is abandoning a single binary due to the increased weight of applications and memory consumption and libraries problems
  Dependency hell is coming ...
  Snap, flatpack, appimage and other strange solutions are inventing something, which are essentially a single binary, but with an overlay (if the developer has hands from the right place, which is often not the case)
  Someone on lemmy says that he literally doesn't care if the application is built in a single binary, consumes extra memory and have libraries problems. Just close all permissions for that application...
  Well, all I can say about this is just assemble a single binary for all applications, stop doing nonsense with a flatpack/snap/etc.
  UPD: or if you really want to break all the conventions, just use nixos. You don't need snap/flatpack/etc.
  
  Flatpak is not single binary, Flatpaks have shared runtime (For example Freedesktop, GNOME, KDE runtimes)
  
  I don't mind other solutions, as long as they have the key features Flatpak offers, namely:
  Being open-source
  Having app permission system
  Having bundled dependencies
  Integrating decently with the system
  Times are changing, and memory constraints for most programs are generally not relevant anymore.
  
  Old guy here too, used un*x before linux existed in the 90s. I still use a Debian based distro (MX) without systemd and no snap/flatpak/whatever. Just build/compile or install .deb and dependencies. Lastly unfortunately I had to install a flatpak to test "deskflow", the first time I installed one, I feel dirty now :-(
- The few things I don't like about flatpaks (which become a problem on atomic distros that use almost all flatpak by design):
  Some types of embedded development is essentially impossible with flatpaks. Try getting the J-link software connected with nrftools and then everything linked to VScodium/codeoss
  Digital signing simply doesn't work, won't work for the foreseeable future, and is not planned to get working,
  Flatpaks sometimes have bugs for no reasons when their package-manager counterparts don't (e.g. in KiCAD 8.0, the upper 20% or so of dialog boxes were unclickable with the mouse, but I could select and modify them with the keyboard, only the flatpak version)
  The status on whether it is still being actively developed or not (at least I hear a fair amount of drama surrounding it)
  But besides those small things, it seem great to me.
  
  Thanks for the input! Yes, there are still certain issues with Flatpaks (for me it was aforementioned VPNs which also don't work through Distrobox, and it would be quite odd anyway). But overall, they manage most apps well, just as you say.
- Well a 10mb app could take 20 but what about a 1gb one?
  
  It would take 1,01gb
  Dependencies typically take 5-80 megabytes of space.
- Changed my mind. Thanks.
- Gimp is a gigabyte larger as a flatpak
  
  Wow that's actually big difference, thanks for bringing it up!
  Good news, though, is that you are free to install Gimp as a native package, and use Flatpaks for the rest.
- Flatpaks, appimages, snaps, etc: why download dependencies once when you can download them every time and bloat your system? Also, heaving to list installed flatpaks and run them is dumb too, why aren't they proper executables? "flatpak run com.thisIsDumb.fuckinEh" instead of just ./fuckinEh
  No thanks. I'll stick to repos and manually compiling software before I seek out a flatpak or the like.
  This shit is why hobbies and things should be gatekept. Just look at how shit PC design is these days. Now they're coming after the OS.
  
  As I said, dependencies typically don't take that much space. We're not in the '80s, I can spare some megabytes to ensure my system runs smoothly and is managed well.
  As per naming, I agree, but barely anyone uses command line to install Flatpaks, as they are primarily meant for desktop use. In GUI, Flatpaks are shown as any other package, and all it takes is to push "Install" button.
  If you want to enjoy your chad geeky Linux, you still can. Go for CachyOS, or anything more obscure, never to use Flatpaks again. At the same time, let others use what is good and convenient to them.

I spent my time fighting AppImages until Canonical started to force Snap on me. I hated Snap so bad it forced me to switch distros. Now I appreciate Flatpak as a result and I don't find AppImages all that bad, either. Also, I haven't found myself in dependency-hell nor have I crashed my distro from unofficial Repos in well over a decade.
-It's a long way of saying It works for me and it's not Snap.
- Appimages are ok, bloated but ok. Unless a library inside is old and won't work.
  Flatpak is annoying and I don't like it at all, so I don't use it. Easy solution.
  Fuck snap though.
- There's a lot to dislike about Canonical, but snaps is still relatively easy to purge and just get on with your underlying Debian package support...

Perhaps ironically, this is mocking a strawman. Flatpacks can be installed and managed using the terminal! Not only that but Linux-Distros have had graphical package managers for decades.
The primary reason that distros have embraced flatpack / snap / appimage is that they promise to lower the burden of managing software repositories. The primary reason that some users are mad is that these often don't provide a good experience:
they are often slower to install/start/run
they have trouble integrating with the rest of the system (ignoring gtk/qt themes for example)
they take a lot more space and bandwidth
Theoretically they are also more secure... But reality of that has also been questioned. Fine grained permissions are nice, but bundling libraries makes it hard to know what outdated libraries are running on the systems.
- As far as I know, I've only installed Flatpaks using the terminal. The most annoying thing about them for me is having to type out the fully-qualified name of the software (e.g. org.mozilla.firefox instead of just firefox), which is a very terminal-specific issue, LOL!

Flatpaks are great for situations where installing software is unnecessary complex or complicated.
I have Steam installed for some games, and since this is a 32 bits application it would install a metric shit-don of 32 bit dependencies I do not use for anything else except Steam, so I use the Flatpak version.
Or Kdenlive for video editing. Kdenlive is the only KDE software I use but when installing it, it feels like due to dependencies I also get pretty much all of the KDE desktop’s applications I do not need nor use nor want on my machine. So Flatpak it is.
And then there is software like OBS, which is known for being borderline unusable when not using the only officially supported way to use it on Linux outside of Ubuntu – which is Flatpak.
- OBS worked pretty well for me last time I used it, using the basic package Debian provided.
- works perfectly with my Arch Linux
  
  btw
- And then there is software like OBS, which is known for being borderline unusable when not using the only officially supported way to use it on Linux outside of Ubuntu – which is Flatpak.
  But why is that? I mean just because it is packaged by someone else does not mean its unusable. So its not the package formats issue, but your distribution packaging it wrong. Right? In installed the Flatpak version, because they developers recommended it to me. I'm not sure why the Archlinux package should be unusable (and I don't want to mess around with it, because I don't know what part is unusable).
  
  But why is that?
  Because the OBS developers say so.
  And since I’m not on Ubuntu, I use the Flatpak version to get OBS as intended bey the OBS developers.
  So its not the package formats issue, but your distribution packaging it wrong. Right?
  Exactly. Most distributions fail hard when it comes to packaging OBS correctly. The OBS devs even threatened to sue Fedora over this.
  https://gitlab.com/fedora/sigs/flatpak/fedora-flatpaks/-/issues/39#note_2344970813
- This is the main benefit. However, i'm finding the software I use requires less dependencies and libraries these days.
  I barely even use flatpaks anymore. Almost everything is in official repos. I couldn't tell you the last time I had a dependency conflict.
- Flatpaks are great for situations where installing software is unnecessary complex or complicated.
  That's my main use for flatpaks too. Add to that any and all closed source software, because you can't trust that without a sandbox around it.
  Recently I've moved from using flatpak for electron apps and instead have a single flatpak ungoogled chromium instance I use for PWAs.

I have used rpms, AppImages, Flatpaks, and source. I have even used a snap or two when I had no other choice.
If you can't work with them all, can you even say you Linux Bro?
- Bro, TRUTH. I have preferences but when you gotta get something done, it doesn't matter how the app comes bundled. I'd run .exe's through Wine if I needed to.
- If you don't compile everything from source, you may as well get a Chromebook!
  
  Never, ever, ever do more effort than is required.

If it's a mostly self-contained app, like a game or a utility, then Flatpak is just fine. If a Flatpak needs to interact with other apps on the host or, worst case, another Flatpak it gets tricky or even impossible. From what I've seen though, AppImage and Snap are even worse at this.
- Flatpak doesn't support dev device access no matter what I use flatseal and all the shabang, so bottles is useless to me for a lot of the wine applications I would like to "not emulate"

Former OS security here (I worked at an OS vendor who sold an OS or two and my job involved keeping it secure).
Fuck no.
Sorry if that makes you downvote, but it doesn't make them safer.
- Would you mind elaborating?
  
  A few reasons security people can have to hesitate on Flatpak:
  In comparison to sticking with strictly vetted repos from the big distros like Debian, RHEL, etc., using Flathub and other sources means normalizing installing software that isn't so strongly vetted. Flathub does at least have a review process but it's by necessity fairly lax.
  Bundling libraries with an application means you can still be vulnerable to an exploit in some library, even if your OS vendor has already rolled out the fix, because of using Flatpak software that still loads the vulnerable version. The freedesktop runtimes at least help limit the scope of this issue but don't eliminate it.
  The sandboxing isn't as secure as many users might expect, which can further encourage installing untrusted software.
  By a typical home user's perspective this probably seems like nothing; in terms of security you're still usually better off with Flatpak than installing random AUR packages, adding random PPA repos, using AppImage programs, installing a bunch of Steam games, blindly building an unfamiliar project you cloned from github, or running bash scripts you find online. But in many contexts none of that is acceptable.
- cool, thanks

Flatpak have their own set of issues. One thing is, that Flatpak applications do not integrate that easily and perfect like a native package. Either rights are to given, you need to know what rights are needed and how to set it up. Theming can be an issue, because it uses its own libraries in the Flatpak eco system instead your current distributions theme and desktop environment.
But on the other hand, they have actually a permission system and are a little bit sandbox compared to normal applications. Packages often are distributed quickly and are up to date directly from the developers, and usually are not installed with root rights.
I'm pretty much a CLI guy as well and prefer native packages (Arch based, plus the AUR). But I also use Flatpaks for various reasons, alongside with AppImages.

i like it. they are very convenient, work every time, and solves the distribution problem.

I'd take a well-maintained native package for my distro over a Flatpak, but sometimes, a Flatpak is just the the easiest way to get the latest version of an application working on Debian without too much tinkering - not always no tinkering, but better than nothing.
This is especially true of GIMP - Flatpak GIMP + Resynthesizer feels like the easiest way to experience GIMP these days. Same with OBS - although I have to weather the Flatpak directory structure, plugins otherwise feel easier to get working than the native package. The bundled runtimes are somewhat annoying, but I'm also not exactly hurting for storage at the moment - I could probaby do to put more of my 2 TB main SSD to use.
I usually just manage Flatpaks from the terminal, though I often have to refresh myself on application URLs. I somewhat wish one could set nicknames so they need not remember the full name.

flatpaks are fine and useful, i just wish we didn't move into a scenario where applications that used to be easily available in distro repos start moving away from them and are only available through flatpaks. distro packages are just so much more efficient in every way. flatpaks are easier on maintainers and developers but that comes at a cost to the user. i have about a dozen or less flatpak apps installed and already i have to download at least 2 gigs of updates each week. i run debian
- Flatpacks a fucking insult to people with limited bandwidth.

Flatpaks together with "immutable" distributions, Wayland and systemd are a heresy, a crime against the UNIX principles, a disgrace in the eyes of of SED and AWK. REPENT! Save your immortal core dumps and return to the one true /home !

i had a hard time getting used to them but now i love them in mint i can switch between the package version and flatpak version and usually the fp one is more updated
- On the other hand each flatpak uses >1Gb of disk where deb packages rarely require more than 100Mb
  
  See, I only use flatpaks sparingly for this reason, but in some cases they're indispensable when you don't want an application to access certain parts of your system. The sandboxing is what makes them useful, in my opinion. For everything else, there's the deb packages.
  
  That's not really true. It lists all the flatpak dependencies in that disk use, but a lot of those are shared, so they don't actually use that much each if you install more than one, and the deb dependencies aren't included at all. Flatpaks really do use more space, especially if you only have a small number of them, but it's not as bad as that.
  
  Plus I found on my install flatpak wasn't cleaning up the flatpaks autoinstalled for older versions of nvidia drivers, they were all still listed as dependencies. Not sure who's to blame but that was taking up a few much needed GBs.
  
  That's certainly a concern for some, but I'm using like 30 GB for all the things I've installed, which is a lot (12 (flatpak-system), 76 (flatpak-user)) but that's on a 2 TB drive, which amounts to like 1½% of the total available space. I don't think that's a bad trade.
- Mint took a while to handle flatpak decently in the update manager, and now it's a nice experience.

I kinda like flatpaks being an option, not sure when they are the only option though.

Not a fan for a few reasons. Flathub (as far as I know) works on the app store model where developers offer their own builds to users, which is probably appealing to people coming from the Windows world who view distros as unnecessary middlemen, but in the GNU/Linux world the distro serves an important role as a sort of union of users; they make sure the software works in the distro environment, resolve breakages, and remove any anti-features placed in there by the upstream developers.
The sandboxing is annoying too, but understandable.
Despite this I will resort to a flatpak if I'm too lazy to figure out how to package something myself.
- The sandboxing is part of the point, having a permissions model that puts the user in control of what programs are allowed to do is critical.

I'm 2 months into my Linux journey and I don't use flatpak. I've had the odd problem with it. I stick to pacman and yay now.

iit: nerds unable to comprehend that building a piece of software from source in not something every person can do.
EDIT: or doesn’t want to do
- one of my least favorite things about arch and other rolling distros is that yay/pacman will try and recompile shit like electron/chromium from source every few days unless you give it very specific instructions not to - which is annoying as shit bc compiling the entirety of chrome from source takes hours even with decent hardware.
  granted, i fucking hate google products too but if you’re doing any web dev it’s necessary sometimes.
  idk im definitely willing to admit i might be the idiot here. managing your packages with pacman might just be routine to some people. to me arch is the epitome of classic bad UX in an open source project. it’s like they got too focused on being cmatrix-style terminal nerds and forgot to make their software efficiently useable outside of 5 very specific people’s workflows. it’s not even the terminal usage that is bad about arch. plenty of things are focused on that and… don’t do it shittily? idk…
  edit: yes to all the arch fanboy’s points in response to me. i used to be super into arch and am aware of the fact that this isn’t explicit behavior but to act like it doesn’t happen in a typical arch user experience is disingenuous. i also disagree with the take that arch doesn’t endorse this outright with its design philosophy, bc it does. the comparison of the AUR to other, similar things like PPAs doesn’t land for me bc PPAs aren’t integrated into the ecosystem nearly as much as AUR is with arch. you can’t tell people to just grab the binaries or not use AUR whenever it’s convenient to blame the user, when arch explicitly endorses a philosophy amicable to self-compilation and also heavily uses the AUR even in their own arch-wiki tutorials for fairly basic use cases. arch wants to have its cake and eat it too and be a great DIY build it yourself toolkit while also catering to daily driver use and more generalist users. don’t get me wrong, it’s the best attempt at such a thing i’ve seen - but at a certain point you have to ask if the premise makes sense anymore. in the case of arch, it doesn’t and it causes several facets of the ecosystem to flounder from a user perspective. the arch community’s habit of shouting “skill issue” at people when they point out legitimate issues with the design philosophy bugs the fuck out of me. this whole OS is a camel.
  
  All of the normal Arch packages are pre-built, so the only way you'd be compiling things that often is if you installed a large amount of things from the AUR. Make sure you get the bin versions instead of git versions.
  The google-chrome and chromium packages are already a binaries so my guess is you need ungoogled-chromium-bin. You can also use the Chaotic AUR repo to get pre-built binaries of a lot of the most common AUR packages. But ideally you should avoid using the AUR when it's not necessary.
  While using the AUR is common, it's a bit frustrating you are blaming Arch for your experience. If you only use pacman you would never compile anything, or have very many conflicts. It's like if you added 20 different PPAs on Ubuntu and then complained about the problems that arose from that.
  
  Is there no -bin version available for those packages?
  
  I've been on Garuda for 4 years or so, not once has this happenoed to me
  
  one of my least favorite things about arch and other rolling distros is that yay/pacman will try and recompile shit like electron/chromium from source every few days unless you give it very specific instructions not to
  My understanding is that constantly triggering compiling like that shouldn't be happening in any typical arch + pacman situation. But it can happen in AUR. If it does, I think it's a special case where you should be squinting and figuring out what's going on and stopping the behavior; it's by no means philosophically endorsed as the usual case scenario for packages on arch.
  There's certainly stuff about Arch that's Different(TM) but nothing about the package manager process is especially different from, say, apt-get or rpm in most cases.
  
  I get that with NixOS even if I use a tablet as my release. It's pretty annoying if it is too new and not cached yet.
- iit: nerds unable to comprehend that building a piece of software from source in not something every person can do
  huh? Using package managers almost never involves compiling. It's there as a capability, but the point is to distribute pre-compiled packages and skip that step in the vast majority of cases.
- Learn

Not a fan. There's often trouble, and some settings is hassle, and sometimes not even working.

I prefer Arch Linux's use of flatpaks, which is none at all ever
- Me pretty much only ever using arch Linux: "what the fuck is a flatpak"
  I once had to install Firefox into wsl (Ubuntu) and I wanted the kms on the spot.
  But maybe it's not that bad for newer people to get started with Linux.
- Joke's on you, I use Flatpaks on Arch
  
  Why, it's totally unnecessary.

IDK why you're being so rage baity. Its easy to avoid flatpaks if you dont like them. Only thing I've ever found as an obstacle was adding the binaries to my PATH so I can launch it with dmenu_run. Otherwise my package manager works well enough.
Bonus points: Write a PKGBUILD that installs flatpaks to /opt and symlink out binaries as needed.
- Just a conversation opener, relax. Only one here shaking a fist in the air is you.
  
  You don't have to use a meme insulting some side to just start a conversation.

The issue I have with flatpaks is the size for most applications. It just doesn't make sense for me. Not that it's not useful and has it's purposes.
- Flatpaks aim to be a middle ground between dependency hell and "let's pull in the universe" bloat.
  Applications packaged as Flatpaks can reference runtimes to share "bases" with other applications, and then provide their own libraries if they need anything bespoke on top of that.
  
  And they are still, in my experience, slow to load, a cumbersome addition to the update process, and often un-necessary.
  Don't get me wrong, if you're in a tight spot and can't make two significant software packages work in a distribution due to conflicting library version requirements... some kind of lightweight container solution is attractive, expedient, and better than just not supporting one of the packages. But, my impression is that a lot of stuff has been moved into flatpak / snap / etc. just because they can. I don't think it's the best, or even preferred, way to maintain software - for the desktop environment.
  (Returns to checking on his Docker containers full of server apps on the R-Pi farm...)
- and has it’s purposes
  Unlike that apostrophe.
- Fast storage is one of the cheapest components of modern PCs so I'm always surprised when Flatpak file size is brought up. It's not something I worry about very much.

Could things like this go in linuxmemes? Memes are fun but it would be nice to keep this a place for actual information. And no, this is not a comment on what it's saying, I'm just tired of so many memes.

Enter the calm and quiet room
Pass out torches and pitchforks, guns and knives
“Snaps exist”
War erupts.
- SNAP BAD
- War with who? I'm posting this from Kubuntu and I'd happily agree with you that Snap should fuck off and die. (In particular, the backend being controlled by Canonical makes it objectively bad compared to Flatpak.) Even among people like me who tolerate Snap (for now...), I really don't think you're gonna find anybody who actually likes it, let alone enough to champion it.
  Can't start a war when there's a consensus!
  
  Oh, hi! I also use Kubuntu, but I love Snaps! I use them for everything. I even tried to use a Snap-version of the kernel, but it completely destroyed my system so I had to reinstall... but other than that, they're great.

Cursed solution to a cursed problem 🤷

I would be, but the promise is just broken. Let's say you want to do the new cool thing and run Bazzite on your console gaming PC on your TV. Now you also want to watch videos that are any normal format these days or (GASP) HEVC like you could on an XBox. You install flatpak VLC because it "just plays everything" in your experience. Your experience is ruptured for both VLC and flatpak now. Flatpaks run on system .so's actually sometimes and installing a Flatpak doesn't mean an app "just works" like Mac or Windows...
- I get the convenience, I really do, and works on every linux distro which is a plus, but I usually stay clear of them because of the bloat. Maybe that is a misconception on my part. I should preference that with the fact I use Arch (btw)...so AUR usually has everything I need.
  
  It doesn't even produce convenience versus just doing AUR package install, though! Nor does it actually containerize for security well! It is bloat alone with shit user experience!
  Edit: to be fair I should note that VLC in Fedora recently came into conflict with Fedora nonfree blocking all updates via some 1997-level RPM jank, idk whose fault it was, but Flatpak gets you around that so it is not without use
  Edit on edit: it runs and doesn't preclude install but current VLC does not work on Fedora out of the box with ANY nonfree codecs
  
  FP and Electron both are brutal on limited storage, so being able to pick and choose where needed can be helpful.

I'm not a huge fan of Flatpaks, they're a lot harder to distribute offline versus something like AppImage. Seriously, you have to like create an offline repository, then create a bundle, and it's like 6 or 7 steps, it's honestly kind of ridiculous lol but other than that they seem fine, and they're easy enough to update (but so are apt packages)
I know some people may say "oh why do you need that", but Linux has taught me that my computer is my own, and I should be able to use it the way I want to. I shouldn't have to fight with my package manager to get it to do what I want. So I guess you could say, no I'm not really a fan of Flatpaks.
Personally, I didn't mind Snaps, but I'm getting kind of really fed up with especially for-profit companies etc so I don't like Snap that much now either.
Apt packages are nice, but the more of them you have installed, especially if you're using Ubuntu-based distros and have lots of PPAs, the more annoying upgrading your distro version can be because of all the dependencies and cross-dependencies.
AppImage tends to just work for me, as long as it's not compiled with a newer libc-bin version than the distro I'm currently using has, and I really enjoy that it's just one file I can copy and run pretty much anywhere.
- I seem to have constant issues with AppImages. Every single one I have currently won't open. I get an error message relating to either qT or GTK. Tried searching for the error and get a bunch of old forum threads talking about either not being compatible with Wayland at all, or comments stating that the one specific AppImage in question must have been "packaged badly". Thankfully, nothing 'mission critical' for me is an AppImage currently, but it is quite upsetting that I have the most problems with the supposed "just works" app packaging/distribution option.
  
  Yes, Flatpak is overall a better approach when compared to AppImages, since being dependent on a known runtime ensures the program will run whenever the runtime is available.
  What I wish they would add is a way to run the flatpak in a portable way. Because as it stands, AppImages is the only option for that. Flatpak doesn't really allow to have a portable installation in a pendrive, for example. At the moment there's no replacement for AppImage in such use cases, which is a pity.
  But there's no fundamental technical design roadblock in flatpak that would prevent it from supporting this in the future, imho. theoretically one could create a program that mounts the flatpak file into a ramfs layered with the runtime and run it.
  
  Yeah that's why I'm a bit weary of switching to Wayland, so many apps still seem unsupported, or have issues, whereas on X11 everything for me just works. Plus, the two DE's I'd actually consider using either don't have Wayland support at all or have very early experimental support (Cinnamon and Xfce) so it'll still be a while for me before I am able to consider switching to Wayland, assuming everything else works.

I like the idea of them because I don't like dealing with dependencies changing and breaking stuff and I don't really care too much about disk space in the context of non-game desktop apps, as I don't tend to install lots of them.
That being said I absolutely hate that permissions are all over the place and flatpak doesn't ship a GUI to manage them by default, nor do you get any indication as to what permissions a program has until you try some functionality (like filesystem or camera access) only to find out it doesn't work out of the box.

I need OBS on this new computer!
Let's install the flatpack!
V4l problems
Plugins Problems
Wayland Problems
I'm just going back to the .deb, thanks.
- Flatpak being securely sandboxed by default is both its biggest strength and its worst point of contention. The XDG is still scrambling to replicate the permission requests paradigm from Android on the Linux desktop.

It's a neat concept. The distro-agnostic aspect is definitely a plus for some people but I still prefer distro-specific installation methods. The only time I would seek out the Flatpak version of a particular software is when it's the only version available.

I "grew up" with Slackware, so I definitely understand the dependency issue.
I like flatpaks (and similar) for certain "atomic" pieces of software, like makemkv. For more "basic" software, like, say, KDE, I want it installed natively.

I use SystemD binary Gentoo with Flatpaks. Sue me.
- Watch out we've got a flatass over here
- ✋😕🤚
  Absolute Dogshit

They always seem to have some critical limitation. Handbrake is too slow via flatpak to work. Flatpak Zoom had no camera access. Flatpak-only Zen browser can't use passkeys. Zen browser asks to be my default browser every time I open it, even though it is and I always say yes; is this a flatpak limitation? I don't know, and I'd prefer not to have to figure it out just for some theoretical benefits and more overhead.
- Flatpak Zoom had no camera access.
  I used Flatpak Zoom for all my job interviews recently. Camera and mic worked flawlessly.
  
  Well that's frustrating. I may need to check that again.
  
  Same
- Flatpak Zen Browser is never asking me to be the default. Maybe it did in the beginning but I don't remember.
  
  Maybe you checked "stop asking"?
  
  Flatpak Firefox does that for me

I don't like how so many distros ship with discover configured to install flatpaks by default. It's a huge newbie trap when you click "open file" and uh where are all my files?? You should only install a flatpak if the program is not available for your OS, or if the native version doesn't work for some reason.

Personally I am okay with them actually. I use several on my system and having each app allowed to have different permissions is super useful.
But also I like things that are directly installed cause they seem just a tad faster performance wise.
- The thing that grinds my gears is when I'm doing an apt update and then it goes off to check on the snaps and drags the process out a lot longer. It doesn't help that they're slower to load the apps too. Then there's the additional attack surfaces to accumulate more CVE reports (and more out of date library versions on your system begging for a security patch...) Mostly, I just purge snap support from Ubuntu these days - but for people who don't notice / mind such things, you do you - maybe they'll eventually improve the lightweight container system until the rest of us don't notice it either.
  
  Ohhh I'm not a huge fan of snap packages, tho to be fair I haven't used them recently so it might just be just biases

Don't like it for one simple reason: no integration with the distribution. Flatpak is this sort universal solution that works, but doesn't necessarily work hand-in-hand with the distro, unlike package managers.

I like them as an option, there are some programs like Bottles or specific game launchers that work under flatpak better than the versions available via native package manager (with Bottles in particular, you can use various built-in sandbox features via flatpak which makes things a bit more secure), but it's also a bit of a pain because it's an additional package manager you have to update separately now, or tweak if things go wrong.

There was a few years where I pretty much only used Flatpaks because I was scared of the terminal. But now that I've learned how to use the terminal, it's so much more convenient because I can quickly update all my applications all in one place without having to open a separate app. Plus, some Flatpaks can fall really behind on software updates.
There might be a Linux userbase someday where no one other than developers actually knows how to use the terminal, because users can run everything they want without a command line, but maybe that's actually a good thing because it'll drive up how many people use a Linux distro.
With Windows and Mac, there's a shareholder incentive to enshittify. With Linux, if a distro goes bad and gets commercialized, there's always another distro people can move to, not to mention there's no financial incentive. The more people get on Linux, the less power these tech companies have. Personally, that and privacy are what drew me to Linux much more so than being able to tinker or fine-tune my experience.
- There might be a Linux userbase someday where no one other than developers actually knows how to use the terminal, because users can run everything they want without a command line
  Ideally, all the essential terminal commands could be replicated in a user-friendly GUI-applicable manner. Don’t ever have to remove the terminal for those that enjoy it, but if we could have a magic world where even the failure states could be navigated with little to no prior knowledge required and it gets everyone away from Windows and Mac for good, I’m all for it.
- Yeah I just wanted off mr corporation's wild ride

There are merits to using flatpaks. With flatseal application, you can fine-tune the permissions given to a certain flatpak application. The best thing is restricting internet usage.

I'm happy to use Flatpaks but the annoyances I've had are like when one application says to use you'll need to point to the binary of another application that it depends on but very understandably doesn't package together, figuring that out to me can be annoying so I'll switch to a regular installation and it all just works together no fuss, no flatseal, no thinking about it really. Also some applications where it's really nice to launch from the terminal especially with arguments or just like the current working directory and with Flatpaks instead of just right off the bat it's application name and hit enter, Flatpak hope you remember the whole package name
org.wilson.spalding.runner.knife.ApplicationName ...
Ya alias but got to remember to do that. So far anything I'd ever want to run from terminal, no Flatpak

Size and gnome/GTK dependencies are main reasons why I don't use Flatpaks (I have nothing against gnome though, it just pulls in too much and KDE is worse in this regards, which is why I use Sway and River)
- Naw fuck gnome and fuck GTK. Over invasive and controlling crapware.

I used them for some things, but other things still don't work quite right. Take Steam for example. I do love flatpaks for testing out apps, things with really finicky dependencies, or pinning a specific version of a software that I want to continue to work in the future. However, for most things, Arch + AUR just covers all my needs without any hiccups.
To me flatpaks are sort of like NixOS. All the benefits they provide aren't something I need on a daily basis. Rolling back works just fine 99% of the time with downgrade. I already have system backups. Despite what some articles might insist, things don't just break all the time. I'm not running untrusted software.
Basically no solution is perfect, but they don't need to be. If the benefits I gain can be recreated through other methods without the tradeoffs they introduce, then I will go with that. Of course, that isn't to say they don't have their place, but sometimes I feel like some people think that "being designed from the ground up" to handle certain use cases is always better than whatever "cobbled together" thing we currently have and that isn't always the case. I'm specifically quoting those two phrases because these are the exact phrases you will hear projects using to justify their existence. In fact, I would go so far as to say that some people have outright confused modularity for "cobbled together".
One last example I want to make is that I make use of projects like the fish shell and helix editor. In these cases, I find the features they introduce to be worth the tradeoffs and work better because of being designed "from the ground up" to do what they do. However, I don't make use of immutable systems, containers such as docker, or say filesystems such as btrfs. The features they provide are not useful enough to me compared to the problems they introduce.

While I wouldn't want flakpak going deep into the OS I think the advantage of using them on the desktop is obvious. Developers can release to multiple dists from a single build and end users get updates and versions immediately rather than waiting for the dist to update its packages. Plus the ability to lock the software down with sandboxes.
The tradeoff is disk consumption but it's not really that big of a deal. Flatpaks are layered so apps can share dependencies. e.g. if the app is GNOME it can share the GNOME runtime with other apps and doesn't need to ship with its own.
- FTFY: Flatpaks are layered so apps can share dependencies. e.g. if the app is GNOME 4.2.11.3 it can share the GNOME 4.2.11.3 runtime with other apps and doesn't need to ship with its own, but every app requires a different GNOME version anyway

I don’t really care about all these different things, as long as none of them become a crazy confusing mess, like Windows DLLs.
- The one "good" thing about containers is that you keep your DLL-like mess localized. Just one or a few related apps run in the container and if they want / need some weird library version, they can have it without breaking other things.
  
  Yeah but that’s a huge benefit already. I am not savvy enough in the development side to know whether that’s a reward that justifies any of the frustrations people have. Personally I don’t really mind varying methods to do any one job, as long as it’s well-documented, easily managed, and does not create a higher load on the system in any respect.

never tried flatpak, snaps were so bad as to never consider non-native installs or just use docker instances when I need to run something weird. so dunno.
whats the use case for a flatpak exactly? maybe im not the target audience???
- Flatpaks mean you don't have to compile everything from scratch and solve dependency conflicts if you want a newer version of a program than what's available in your distro's repo, of if it's something that doesn't have a native version at all.
- Apps not available in distro repositories
  Apps with dependency conflicts

Honestly? I'm a fan of Flatpaks where they make sense. I'm also okay with Appimages. Native is pretty cool. Whatever gets the thing to run really.
I like to use the terminal to update my applications, it's just faster. I have an alias to run an update for native packages and flatpaks. You can use your GUI of choice. Or not, it's up to you. It's that sort of freedom that I love about using Linux.
In some cases, Flatpak actually helps, as in my case, with Prism Launcher. Some of my system libraries cause issues with a handful of mods, but the libraries distributed with the Flatpak get that working. Hopefully that's not foreshadowing more future library-related issues.

I'm a big fan of the idea of sandboxed apps. Flatpak is not great as it compromises sandboxing for compatibility (both with distros and apps) and also it's quite stagnant now. But there are no other options anyway, so I use it.

What’s a flatpak? Is that like a worse NixOS package? I prefer NixOS, BTW.
- sandboxed application bundle installed from a flathub-compatible store or a local source (github etc)

I've heard Flatpaks aren't great at CLI tools, is that true ?
As a Nix user, I'm glad Flatpaks exist for other people, but I only ever use them when a package is not available from Nix directly. Seeing as Nix is literally the biggest package manager out there, it's a pretty rare occurrence.
- Yes it is true. Flatpak is for gui apps only, at least as far as I know.
- I posted this in another thread, but reposting here because a lot of people, including myself up until very recently, were under that impression:
  I've packaged a CLI that I made as a flatpak. It works just fine. Nothing weird was required to make it work.
  The only thing is that if you want to use a CLI flatpak, you probably want to set an alias in your shell to make running it easier.
  I'm not sure why more CLIs aren't offered as flatpaks. Maybe because static linking them is so easy? I know people focus on flatpak sandboxing as a primary benefit, but I can't help but think that if static linking was easier for bigger applications, it wouldn't be needed as much.

The commonly cited issues with Flatpaks are:

What you gain for it? Everything.

Alternatives?

And it is Flatpak.

SNAP BAD