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The article mentions that Flatpack is not suitable for servers because it uses desktop features. Does anyone know what those features are or have more details?

• LtWorf 1y ago
  AFAIK it cannot do CLI applications at all.
  • jeroenhd 1y ago
    It can, but because the Flatpak system depends on APIs like D-Bus getting those to work in headless environments (SSH, framebuffer console, raw TTY) is a pain. Flatpak will even helpfully link binaries you install to a directory you can add to your $PATH to make command line invocation easy.
• mananaysiempre 1y ago
  This may refer to xdg-desktop-portal[1], which is usable without Flatpak, but Flatpak forces you to go through it to access anything outside the app’s private sandbox. In particular, access to user files is mediated through a powerbox (trusted file dialog) [2] provided by the desktop environment. In a sense, Flatpak apps are normal Linux apps to about the same extent that WinRT/UWP apps are normal Windows apps—close, but more limited, and you’re going to need significant porting in either direction. (This has also made an otherwise nice music player[3] unusable to me other than by dragging and dropping individual files from the file manager, as all of my music lives in git-annex, and accesses through git-annex symlinks are indistinguishable from sandbox escape attempts. On one hand, understandable; on the other, again, the software is effectively useless because of this.) [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_Desktop_Portal https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_Desktop_Portal [2] https://wiki.c2.com/?PowerBox https://wiki.c2.com/?PowerBox [3] https://apps.gnome.org/Amberol https://apps.gnome.org/Amberol
  • circularfoyers 1y ago
    > On one hand, understandable; on the other, again, the software is effectively useless because of this. Just in case you didn't already know, you can use Flatseal[1] to add the symlinked paths outside of those in the default whitelisted paths. I think it's a good thing Flatpak have followed a security permissions system similar to Android, as I think it's great for security, but I definitely think they need to make this process more integrated and user friendly. [1] https://flathub.org/apps/com.github.tchx84.Flatseal https://flathub.org/apps/com.github.tchx84.Flatseal
    • Vilian 1y ago
      I can change those permission directly in the KDE settings, with the need to download flatseal, others DE need to implement their own
  • Vilian 1y ago
    You can allow an application complete access to a folder or your home directory, use flatseal for that
• ponorin 1y ago
  It assumes that you have a DE running and depends on features like D-Bus. So it's not designed to run headless except for building flatpak packages.