this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
78 points (93.3% liked)

Linux

48404 readers
1071 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

target OS is debian or linux mint

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is interopability, that is, flatpak interacting with the rest of your system.

I'm not that familair with flatpak, but in my brief experience with the steam flatpak, I had trouble getting it to recognize my controllers. Steam installed through pacman (Arch's package manager) had no such issues, on the other hand. My hunch is that this has to with flatpaks being more isolated from the rest of your system.

Im pretty sure that's just some kind of permission issue, but it can be nice to not have to troubleshoot acces rights and the like. But this is obviously a double edged sword: more isolation may also mean more security, just at the cost of ease of interaction with other components.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago

The steam flatpak can't install udev rules. It works if you install a packacke such as steam-devices on your host system. See https://github.com/flathub/com.valvesoftware.Steam/wiki#my-controller-isnt-being-detected

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

The good news is that flatpak and XDG portals are progressing

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah, both have pros and cons. I have Steam installed through pacman and flatpak also. For me I have the Flatpak version because it contains its own version of glibc. This mostly doesn't matter, except I play Squad and it's doing something with it's anti-cheat that isn't supported in the most recent versions of glibc, so I use the Flatpak version for Squad only.

Flatpak is essentially a more controlled environment. It will contain everything it needs to work, which is good for ensuring it works but bad because you'll have duplicates. It mostly doesn't matter which you use, but occasionally it does.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

This issue with glibc should have been sorted out. But yeah, if you use arch you may have some issues from time to time cause some projects broke their ABIs sometimes, but I prefer to use the one with pacman cause I only have to update my entire system with one command, also theming is an issue with flatpak that I know there is solutions out there but AFAIK are always adhoc solutions for each app.

Also, IIRC steam folder is always in a weird place using flatpak.