According to Door Knocker, almost half of the portals are unavailable on Ubuntu 16.04, compared to only one unavailable on Fedora 39 with GNOME, which means Flatpaks running here may have more limited capabilities than usual.
Cool testament to flatpak’s strengths. If an OS update makes a breaking change it won’t affect the apps. Makes sense that it works backwards too but I never thought to do it.
Having a rock-solid Debian stable as a desktop with up-to-date softwares when it matters. It sounded impossible a few years ago but that might be achievable now with Flatpak. That’s awesome.
Exactly what I usual say, the best of the two worlds. There are still a few annoyance though, the theme integration part that is easy to fix and not being able to get Ungoogled working with a KeePassXC when both are Flatpaks
I basically do this with Debian + Docker right now and yes, it is awesome
I also like nix because it is lighter on resources.
Ok, so it’s time for me to do some research on Flatpaks now. I’m an old schooler from Redhat days and haven’t kept up with the new stuff all that much.
Flatpaks is a distro independent way of installing apps, similair to snaps. However it does not require a proprietary backend like snaps do.
It uses “runtimes” that contain the libraries that are required for the app, such as freedesktop, gnome, kde and elementary. Each app requests a specific runtime and version which prevents library conflicts.
Although runtimes are shared the different versions can take up quite a bit of space. This is a common criticism of Flatpak and one of the major drawbacks compared to the distro’s native package manager. Another disadvantage is that the sandboxing can cause issues with the functionality of the app if it requires certain system functionality. Authors (and users) can configure which parts of the system to expose (dbus, files, network, etc) but sometimes this is done incorrectly (looking at you Discord) which can cause the aforementioned issues.
One of the major advantages is that it simplifies the work for Application developers, they can target 1 system and don’t have to package the application and it’s libraries for each distro. It also means that the applications aren’t dependent on the distro’s for newer versions. You can use Debian stable with a version of an app that came out yesterday.
I personally tend to use Flatpaks quite often except for software that is included in the distro by default and apps that have issues with sandboxing such as Steam and VSCode.
Sounds a bit like docker and its containers?
As well as running on all distros, it also provides other benefits:
- You can run modern software on old/stable distros
- Dependencies being (mostly) included in the package means that different applications can more easily have different versions of dependencies
- Finicky packages are more stable for that same reason
- Distro maintainers don’t need to package as many applications (https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected]/thread/46ZZ6GZ2W3G4OJYX3BIWTAW75H37TVW6/), and application maintainers don’t need to worry about multiple distros and versions of dependencies
However, some applications don’t work as well because of the sandbox, but I think this will change with the rising popularity of Flatpak, as more developers will use portals instead of direct access. Also, there are some bugs and missing features, like how heavy use of the org.freedesktop.Flatpak portal for dbus causes a memory leak (https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-dbus-proxy/issues/51), but it’s overall pretty good. Most applications I use are Flatpaks.
Flatpaks are to distros what Alpine is for docker containers. A base for creating distro agnostic desktop applications. It’s really cool and has picked up quite some good support within the Linux community.
I think that Flatpak being Docker for desktop applications would be a better comparison.
Mint integrates flatpak seemlessly into its graphic package management and update tools.
KDE’s “Discover Store” (gui package manager) also does as well, which is awesome. While I don’t like the idea of packaging system libraries with software due to the fact that they can and will sit out of date and hold on to vulnerabilities, I do like what flatpak is trying to achieve and the fact that we have a very solid leader in the area, putting the closed-source proprietary Snaps system firmly in second place.
Another big advantage of Flatpaks is the portability, since they live in your home.
I’ve had to reinstall distros and swap to different ones a decent amount. I simply backup and restore my home dir, and all my flatpaks get carried over, appear in my app launchers, and usually have their app data saved so I don’t even have to relogin/reconfigure to stuff. It’s as if I had just closed and opened it again.
It’s crazy this works even when completely swapping distros.
I run Arch Linux (by the way) on my work laptop. One time Unity botched their game engine on Arch, so I had to rollback my whole system to keep an older version of GTK just so I could keep doing my work.
For a good 6 months, any up-to-date application had to be a Flatpak, because updating my system was off the table. Completely saved my bacon, and let me stay on top of rolling-release apps with ease.
You could set up a development environment using distrobox in an arch container and keep the downgraded packages installed in there if it happens again
IgnorePkg?
what’s the one missing on Fedora 39?
