25 ms·

I used to think Flatpaks were a huge pain the butt, but over the last few years, I moved to using them for all third party software that I run on my Fedora Linu

by jdoss 4y ago

I used to think Flatpaks were a huge pain the butt, but over the last few years, I moved to using them for all third party software that I run on my Fedora Linux workstation. Zoom, Slack, Spotify, Steam, Discord, Obsidian all run without issues and they get consistent updates. I am convinced now that they are one of the best ways to ship commercial software on to Linux desktop. Flatpak has been a key part of me becoming 100% Windows free for my PC gaming. Not having to run a desktop KVM to switch between my work workstation and my Gaming PC has been super great.

uonpopular_th 4y ago
>Zoom, Slack, Spotify, Steam, Discord, Obsidian Well yes, these are all closed source binaries. In terms of usage it's not all that different to running them in a VM. In the bad old days we just did it in an XP windows VM instead.
silisili 4y ago
I really like the idea. I think the only issue I ever had with them was the inability to inject files inside. Do you know if that's possible? I was trying to use a browser, I think Vivaldi, that had instructions for enabling widevine by copying a file to a certain directory, but I couldn't find a clean way to do so.
- FeistySkink 4y ago
  If it's just a config file and the package is installed under a user, check .var/lib/flatpak/app
jchw 4y ago
One big tricky thing is plugins, such as for OBS. ABI incompatibility and sandboxing can make it tricky and confusing for end users. Flatpak itself could theoretically provide answers here.
- sirsinsalot 4y ago
  I feel like you'd end up going full circle back to apt and npm and ...
- viraptor 4y ago
  They'll have to do it at some point. There's just too many apps with plugins to ignore it. (Including basically all of audio production with their VSTs)
- lmm 4y ago
  Yep. The main way I notice that an app is using FlatPak is it becomes impossible for me to type Japanese in it because the person distributing it hasn't done the complicated stuff you have to do to make IME work with FlatPak.
  - jchw 4y ago
    I really hope Wayland helps here. It has an IME input API, so if that's sufficient, maybe it can displace out-of-band input buses on the application-side.
idonotknowwhy 4y ago
So these integrate well now? I normally just use AUR for everything now, and remember having issues with a flatpak for rpcs3 a few years ago, ended up compiling from src
- irthomasthomas 4y ago
  No, most that I tried do not integrate well at all.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  integrate with what?
- boudin 4y ago
  Yes, actually flatpak triggered some interesting projects that are going beyong flatpak now: - pipewire for audio/video stream management that allows sandboxing - xdg-desktop portals to integrate the sandboxed apps in the host desktop environment and operating system. It's what allows the host DE ui to grant permissions (like reading/writing a file, accessing screen share, etc...) It will depend how an app has been packaged, but when well done the sandboxing is invisible.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
yamtaddle 4y ago
Last I tried all three of the semi-popular formats like this, AppImage was the only one that didn't feel fundamentally wrong (though what I gather was the closest thing to an official repository for them looked sketchy as hell—somehow they copied the exact CSS vibe as a content-scraped StackOverflow spam site). But that was a couple years ago. I know Snaps still suck, but haven't messed with Flatpacks since then, so maybe they're better now.
- bandrami 4y ago
  How many different versions of OpenSSL are running on my laptop right now? Who can say? That's the beauty of flatpak: if you sweep the problems of software management under a big enough rug, they go away and never bother you again.
  - Volundr 4y ago
    Until openssl has another vulnerability.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      It's a problem of the many-distros model for Linux—or, if you prefer, it's a problem of Linux just being a kernel. You can't just target "Desktop Linux 15" and expect to have all the stuff that Desktop Linux 15 has, including a robust set of basic libraries and a unified GUI stack and standard same-on-every-copy-of-Linux-15 multimedia libraries and services and all that good stuff, and let the OS worry about keeping that secure without breaking your program. Programs end up having to be a lot more fiddly about their dependencies, and it causes problems. Now, maybe the Linux approach is so good and useful in other ways that it's worth putting up with that, but it is a big problem and people are going to solve it, one way or another. If the model can't be changed, then the only solutions available may be bad, but they'll be used, and widely.
      - fijiaarone 4y ago
        Freedom bad.
Entinel 4y ago
I use Fedora and this is how I use Flatpak as well. Some software does have some problems when used through Flatpak. I vaguely recall Blender's Flatpak version having some issues. I would also like to see more transparency with who is publishing the Flatpak on Flathub. Maybe I'm just dumb but it is not immediately obvious to me who the publisher is and whether or not this is an officially supported Flatpak application.
- johnny22 4y ago
  they are adding a "verified publisher" feature very soon I think. I saw screenshots of the beta for it.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  A whole lot of the flatpaks currently are packaged by 3rd parties and they have all kinds of quirks especially around filesystem access. When the projects officially package a flatpak it's generally all working.
fdr 4y ago
I also use it like this. I got into it for the sandboxing, although I know there are a "few" lurking issues on this point. But, some of the sandboxing definitely works, and were I a flatpak engineer I'd want to see some indication of traction to justify working towards goals of completion, and no other project with any packaging base I can think of is anywhere close, so, I use it. In fact...I think I have all the software packages you have, except Obsidian, but also, Signal, Anki, and Element. I did consider using it to deploy and update a CLI on (multiple) Linux(es), but found that the design of common shells make that kind of thing uncomfortable, as you need to teach them about autocompletion and the user also has to muck with getting the utility into $PATH. Normal-style packages simply have the privileges to muck with /etc and /usr/bin and that's the end of that, but it is somewhat unsatisfying that this is almost necessarily the case.
curt15 4y ago
> I am convinced now that they are one of the best ways to ship commercial software on to Linux desktop. Commercial software would like a comprehensive and relatively stable API like what Windows famously provides. Flatpak's analog of the Windows API is the runtime. What level and duration of maintenance do Flatpak runtimes typically receive?
- Conan_Kudo 4y ago
  Red Hat offers a runtime that has a 10 year lifecycle for applications. Beyond that, I don't know of anything quite like that. https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2020/08/12/introducing-the-red-hat-flatpak-runtime-for-desktop-containers https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2020/08/12/introducing-th...
neurostimulant 4y ago
I had issues with certain games crashing when run from Steam installed via Flatpak. It's not permission issues, but seems to be due to the Flatpak version bundled different system libraries. Have you encounter such issue on your end?
- bogwog 4y ago
  I haven’t, but I’m assuming those were (possibly old) Linux native games? Since proton shouldn’t have any dependency issues, especially since Steam installs that itself.
- yazzku 4y ago
  I have seen this, if I recall correctly, on an NVIDIA system. I suspect the Flatpak had trouble working with the (proprietary) driver.
  - neurostimulant 4y ago
    I think it was MESA-related, but strangely only some games were having issues.
bogwog 4y ago
I switched to Fedora Kinoite (KDE spin of Silverblue) to force me to go all in on Flatpaks, and now I love them. They make so much sense and work so well. I feel like the people who dislike them either never actually used them, or they’re just the type of person who hates change and will never be happy with new things.
- _cenw 4y ago
  Do you use an IDE, and if so, which? Last I checked Flathub shipped with VSCode and IntelliJ, despite both having major broken parts. The VSCode workaround back when I tried Silverblue was to run sshd inside toolbox and remote Flatpak VSCode into it. It was definitely not a frictionless experience. And IntelliJ having the terminal and debugging broken removes most of the useful parts of the IDE for me.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    Yeah, Flatpak has some kind of hangup about the idea that some tools need actually real full access to the system. Wireshark is similarly useless because you can't actually capture packets with it. It is really strange that both this and "it's totally ok for packages to set their own security defaults" are true in Flatpak land.
    - bogwog 4y ago
      If Linux starts attracting commercial development and we see an influx of new apps, wouldn't you feel safe knowing that the ones you install as flatpaks aren't allowed to capture packets on your system? Wireshark is a tool more in the realm of development/sysadminry, whereas flatpaks are designed for more traditional apps, like Discord or Firefox. I wouldn't want my development tools to come from flatpaks even if they had full access to the system, because I wouldn't have control over dependencies. Traditional system package managers are a better fit for that, and on Silverblue you have Toolbox for that.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
yazzku 4y ago
> Zoom, Slack, Spotify, Steam, Discord, Obsidian Most of these are proprietary. I view these third-party stores mostly as a way to ship proprietary software. Not sure what else they add, and the downsides of having yet another package manager on top of your system's are obvious. I'm surprised KDE is behind this. Some sort of packaging standard that works across distributions would be beneficial, but it'd have to be integrated with the system's package manager, not tacked on.
- kombine 4y ago
  If you are not on a rolling distro, it's a major pain to install latest versions of even open source apps.
pxc 4y ago
> I used to think Flatpaks were a huge pain the butt, but over the last few years, I moved to using them for all third party software I am a Nix person who has been a bit obsessed with package management for a long time, and it's probably fair to call me a bit of a 'container skeptic'. I know many good reasons to prefer other means of installing packages, and I agree with most of them. I care about things like the extra storage overhead, the increased app startup time, the additional complexity associated with portals and sandboxing, the extent to which Flatpak applications do or don't support the available sandboxing features, and the orientation of Flatpak towards enabling a larger proprietary software ecosystem I'm not very interested in. But despite all of that, and despite my interest in— and to some extent, commitment to— competing paradigms... I think Flatpak does what it tries to do pretty well. It seems to me that the engineers working on it have done a pretty good job of mitigating the downsides and risks, like library duplication and difficulty of shared updates, disk usage, etc. Considering what it aims to do, it feels pretty fast, reliable, and neat. And I trust it way more than an apt or dnf or pacman repo hosted by the likes of Zoom, Google, Discord, etc. It's a much better way to manage third-party software than anything else we've got. I think it's clearly a good thing that the biggest and most popular desktop environments are coalescing around it. This is good news for desktop Linux users in general, and especially good news for those of us who don't run Ubuntu or derivatives. The more things are packaged for Flatpak, the lower the burden for practical usage of distros maintained by small or new communities.
gavmor 4y ago
Obsidian without git plugin is pretty much a non-starter for me. What's the point in a folder full of markdown files that can't be checked into git? Only works out of the box for the AppImage, for now. I can't remember why. I suppose I am missing out on 0-click updates of some kind.
- UltimateEdge 4y ago
  I started using Obsidian a few months ago, and my git repo is initialised on the file system outside the Obsidian vault. I'm now realising that I'm not using any of Obsidian's special features other than being a markdown editor with support for tags.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by jdoss 4y ago

uonpopular_th 4y ago

>Zoom, Slack, Spotify, Steam, Discord, Obsidian Well yes, these are all closed source binaries. In terms of usage it's not all that different to running them in a VM. In the bad old days we just did it in an XP windows VM instead.

silisili 4y ago

I really like the idea. I think the only issue I ever had with them was the inability to inject files inside. Do you know if that's possible? I was trying to use a browser, I think Vivaldi, that had instructions for enabling widevine by copying a file to a certain directory, but I couldn't find a clean way to do so.

FeistySkink 4y ago
If it's just a config file and the package is installed under a user, check .var/lib/flatpak/app

jchw 4y ago

One big tricky thing is plugins, such as for OBS. ABI incompatibility and sandboxing can make it tricky and confusing for end users. Flatpak itself could theoretically provide answers here.

sirsinsalot 4y ago
I feel like you'd end up going full circle back to apt and npm and ...
viraptor 4y ago
They'll have to do it at some point. There's just too many apps with plugins to ignore it. (Including basically all of audio production with their VSTs)
lmm 4y ago
Yep. The main way I notice that an app is using FlatPak is it becomes impossible for me to type Japanese in it because the person distributing it hasn't done the complicated stuff you have to do to make IME work with FlatPak.
- jchw 4y ago
  I really hope Wayland helps here. It has an IME input API, so if that's sufficient, maybe it can displace out-of-band input buses on the application-side.

idonotknowwhy 4y ago

So these integrate well now? I normally just use AUR for everything now, and remember having issues with a flatpak for rpcs3 a few years ago, ended up compiling from src

irthomasthomas 4y ago
No, most that I tried do not integrate well at all.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
integrate with what?
boudin 4y ago
Yes, actually flatpak triggered some interesting projects that are going beyong flatpak now: - pipewire for audio/video stream management that allows sandboxing - xdg-desktop portals to integrate the sandboxed apps in the host desktop environment and operating system. It's what allows the host DE ui to grant permissions (like reading/writing a file, accessing screen share, etc...) It will depend how an app has been packaged, but when well done the sandboxing is invisible.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

yamtaddle 4y ago

Last I tried all three of the semi-popular formats like this, AppImage was the only one that didn't feel fundamentally wrong (though what I gather was the closest thing to an official repository for them looked sketchy as hell—somehow they copied the exact CSS vibe as a content-scraped StackOverflow spam site). But that was a couple years ago. I know Snaps still suck, but haven't messed with Flatpacks since then, so maybe they're better now.

bandrami 4y ago
How many different versions of OpenSSL are running on my laptop right now? Who can say? That's the beauty of flatpak: if you sweep the problems of software management under a big enough rug, they go away and never bother you again.
- Volundr 4y ago
  Until openssl has another vulnerability.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    It's a problem of the many-distros model for Linux—or, if you prefer, it's a problem of Linux just being a kernel. You can't just target "Desktop Linux 15" and expect to have all the stuff that Desktop Linux 15 has, including a robust set of basic libraries and a unified GUI stack and standard same-on-every-copy-of-Linux-15 multimedia libraries and services and all that good stuff, and let the OS worry about keeping that secure without breaking your program. Programs end up having to be a lot more fiddly about their dependencies, and it causes problems. Now, maybe the Linux approach is so good and useful in other ways that it's worth putting up with that, but it is a big problem and people are going to solve it, one way or another. If the model can't be changed, then the only solutions available may be bad, but they'll be used, and widely.
    - fijiaarone 4y ago
      Freedom bad.

Entinel 4y ago

I use Fedora and this is how I use Flatpak as well. Some software does have some problems when used through Flatpak. I vaguely recall Blender's Flatpak version having some issues. I would also like to see more transparency with who is publishing the Flatpak on Flathub. Maybe I'm just dumb but it is not immediately obvious to me who the publisher is and whether or not this is an officially supported Flatpak application.

johnny22 4y ago
they are adding a "verified publisher" feature very soon I think. I saw screenshots of the beta for it.
Gigachad 4y ago
A whole lot of the flatpaks currently are packaged by 3rd parties and they have all kinds of quirks especially around filesystem access. When the projects officially package a flatpak it's generally all working.

fdr 4y ago

I also use it like this. I got into it for the sandboxing, although I know there are a "few" lurking issues on this point. But, some of the sandboxing definitely works, and were I a flatpak engineer I'd want to see some indication of traction to justify working towards goals of completion, and no other project with any packaging base I can think of is anywhere close, so, I use it. In fact...I think I have all the software packages you have, except Obsidian, but also, Signal, Anki, and Element. I did consider using it to deploy and update a CLI on (multiple) Linux(es), but found that the design of common shells make that kind of thing uncomfortable, as you need to teach them about autocompletion and the user also has to muck with getting the utility into $PATH. Normal-style packages simply have the privileges to muck with /etc and /usr/bin and that's the end of that, but it is somewhat unsatisfying that this is almost necessarily the case.

curt15 4y ago

> I am convinced now that they are one of the best ways to ship commercial software on to Linux desktop. Commercial software would like a comprehensive and relatively stable API like what Windows famously provides. Flatpak's analog of the Windows API is the runtime. What level and duration of maintenance do Flatpak runtimes typically receive?

Conan_Kudo 4y ago
Red Hat offers a runtime that has a 10 year lifecycle for applications. Beyond that, I don't know of anything quite like that. https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2020/08/12/introducing-the-red-hat-flatpak-runtime-for-desktop-containers https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2020/08/12/introducing-th...

neurostimulant 4y ago

I had issues with certain games crashing when run from Steam installed via Flatpak. It's not permission issues, but seems to be due to the Flatpak version bundled different system libraries. Have you encounter such issue on your end?

bogwog 4y ago
I haven’t, but I’m assuming those were (possibly old) Linux native games? Since proton shouldn’t have any dependency issues, especially since Steam installs that itself.
yazzku 4y ago
I have seen this, if I recall correctly, on an NVIDIA system. I suspect the Flatpak had trouble working with the (proprietary) driver.
- neurostimulant 4y ago
  I think it was MESA-related, but strangely only some games were having issues.

bogwog 4y ago

I switched to Fedora Kinoite (KDE spin of Silverblue) to force me to go all in on Flatpaks, and now I love them. They make so much sense and work so well. I feel like the people who dislike them either never actually used them, or they’re just the type of person who hates change and will never be happy with new things.

_cenw 4y ago
Do you use an IDE, and if so, which? Last I checked Flathub shipped with VSCode and IntelliJ, despite both having major broken parts. The VSCode workaround back when I tried Silverblue was to run sshd inside toolbox and remote Flatpak VSCode into it. It was definitely not a frictionless experience. And IntelliJ having the terminal and debugging broken removes most of the useful parts of the IDE for me.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  Yeah, Flatpak has some kind of hangup about the idea that some tools need actually real full access to the system. Wireshark is similarly useless because you can't actually capture packets with it. It is really strange that both this and "it's totally ok for packages to set their own security defaults" are true in Flatpak land.
  - bogwog 4y ago
    If Linux starts attracting commercial development and we see an influx of new apps, wouldn't you feel safe knowing that the ones you install as flatpaks aren't allowed to capture packets on your system? Wireshark is a tool more in the realm of development/sysadminry, whereas flatpaks are designed for more traditional apps, like Discord or Firefox. I wouldn't want my development tools to come from flatpaks even if they had full access to the system, because I wouldn't have control over dependencies. Traditional system package managers are a better fit for that, and on Silverblue you have Toolbox for that.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago

yazzku 4y ago

> Zoom, Slack, Spotify, Steam, Discord, Obsidian Most of these are proprietary. I view these third-party stores mostly as a way to ship proprietary software. Not sure what else they add, and the downsides of having yet another package manager on top of your system's are obvious. I'm surprised KDE is behind this. Some sort of packaging standard that works across distributions would be beneficial, but it'd have to be integrated with the system's package manager, not tacked on.

kombine 4y ago
If you are not on a rolling distro, it's a major pain to install latest versions of even open source apps.

pxc 4y ago

> I used to think Flatpaks were a huge pain the butt, but over the last few years, I moved to using them for all third party software I am a Nix person who has been a bit obsessed with package management for a long time, and it's probably fair to call me a bit of a 'container skeptic'. I know many good reasons to prefer other means of installing packages, and I agree with most of them. I care about things like the extra storage overhead, the increased app startup time, the additional complexity associated with portals and sandboxing, the extent to which Flatpak applications do or don't support the available sandboxing features, and the orientation of Flatpak towards enabling a larger proprietary software ecosystem I'm not very interested in. But despite all of that, and despite my interest in— and to some extent, commitment to— competing paradigms... I think Flatpak does what it tries to do pretty well. It seems to me that the engineers working on it have done a pretty good job of mitigating the downsides and risks, like library duplication and difficulty of shared updates, disk usage, etc. Considering what it aims to do, it feels pretty fast, reliable, and neat. And I trust it way more than an apt or dnf or pacman repo hosted by the likes of Zoom, Google, Discord, etc. It's a much better way to manage third-party software than anything else we've got. I think it's clearly a good thing that the biggest and most popular desktop environments are coalescing around it. This is good news for desktop Linux users in general, and especially good news for those of us who don't run Ubuntu or derivatives. The more things are packaged for Flatpak, the lower the burden for practical usage of distros maintained by small or new communities.

gavmor 4y ago

Obsidian without git plugin is pretty much a non-starter for me. What's the point in a folder full of markdown files that can't be checked into git? Only works out of the box for the AppImage, for now. I can't remember why. I suppose I am missing out on 0-click updates of some kind.

UltimateEdge 4y ago
I started using Obsidian a few months ago, and my git repo is initialised on the file system outside the Obsidian vault. I'm now realising that I'm not using any of Obsidian's special features other than being a markdown editor with support for tags.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]