I’ve been using arch for a while now and I always used Flatpaks for proprietary software that might do some creepy shit because Flatpaks are supposed to be sandboxed (e.g. Steam). And Flatpaks always worked flawlessly OOTB for me. AUR for things I trust. I’ve read on the internet how people prefer AUR over Flatpaks. Why? And how do y’all cope with waiting for all the AUR installed packages to rebuild after every update? Alacritty takes ages to build for me. Which is why I only update the AUR installed and built applications every 2 weeks.
An AUR package has been done for Arch by (supposedly) someone who knows what they are doing and needs it on their Arch Machine
A Flatpak is something done by someone, to (supposedly) work everywhere, untested on Arch, that may or may not work. And crash (Ardour on Asahi). Or waste hours or you life to render files incorrectly (kdenlive on arch and asahi).
Native versions work perfectly.
I thought I was clever in using arch/aur for everything, but pull KDE or QT apps from Flatpak to keep my gnome install a bit more tidy… For this, you’d have to have those Flataks to work, and sometimes they don’t.
To be fair, there are a lot of Flatpacks published by the devs themselves (especially in the Gnome/GTK ecosystem).
I prefer Flatpaks, not only because I support the format, but also because of containerization and the ability to clean up an application completely.
I absolutely hate it when apps randomly place config files everywhere.
both is good
Personally I tend to go AUR first, then Flatpak and then Appimage if there’s no other choice. Snaps never lol
The reason being, I find that Flatpaks sometimes have issues with not being able to access certain things in the filesystem which can cause problems. That’s presumably by design since they’re sandboxed and you can fix it with Flatseal or whatever, but it’s an extra level of fiddling that I can’t always be bothered with. I do prefer Flatpaks for certain things that are messy with dependencies though (looking at you, Steam.) Appimages I don’t really like because I hate having to go and check manually for updates for each one, it feels too much like Windows to me. But there are a couple of things that only have Appimage versions so I’ll suck it up.
Snaps I just find to be a huge pain in the ass, and I’ve never found an app I need that doesn’t already have a version on the AUR or as Flatpak or an Appimage, so I really have no need for them.
Appimages I don’t really like because I hate having to go and check manually for updates for each one, it feels too much like Windows to me. But there are a couple of things that only have Appimage versions so I’ll suck it up.
Oh that’s handy, thanks! I only have like 3 things as appimages but I already switched them over lol
I usually do distro repos, followed by aur, then flatpak if the aur version is too cumbersome (e.g. obs, game emulators). Funnily enough I use steam native because when I was using the flatpak. I had trouble with mods and things of that nature. A lot of that stuff either needs to be moved to different locations, straight up doesn’t work, or requires a bit of permission fiddling and I just didn’t wanna go through that. On the other hand. I believe there was a glibc issue on Arch that broke all games on steam native for a couple of days which the flatpak didn’t suffer from. Just goes to show nothing is perfect either way.
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Flatpak.
