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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).

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What has been your experience with Flatpak? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've been involved with Linux for a long time, and Flatpak almost seems too good to be true:
Just install any app on any distro, isolated from the base system and with granular rights management. I've just set up my first flatpak-centric system and didn't notice any issues with it at all, apart from a 1-second waiting time before an app is launched.

What's your long-term experience?

Notice any annoying bugs or instabilities? Do apps crash a lot? Disappear from Flathub or are unmaintained? Do you often have issues with apps that don't integrate well with your native system? Are important apps missing?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I started on Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora. Native apps where often horrible. I remember SciDavis for Ubuntu being completely broken, Libreoffice for Fedora, and Flatpak just worked.

Officially supported Flatpaks are great, a bit like the Windows way but better, as they are reviewed, containerized and in an actual repository.

But flatpakking random apps isnt that easy, but I really want to learn it. Especially an easy semi-automatic way of converting Appimages (may they burn in hell) to Flatpaks. Like BalenaEtcher and so many more.

Also, Flatpaks are not secure in the case of biig projects. Nearly all the known Linux apps like Libreoffice, Gimp, Inkscape etc are unisolated. And trying to specify the permissions (only home and all the mounts, instead of your entire root partition) gives you "they are insecure anyways and should get portals" and your PRs closed.

So they are in a very incomplete state currently, and you need to manually secure them to be actually kinda protected. But without Portals, entire home access is not actually isolated.

Also, try and use the --verified repo:

flatpak remote-add --subset=verified flathub-verified https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Problem here is that many apps like VLC, that work great, are not yet adopted by upstream, so the verified repo is not really usable currently.

And native messaging (keepassxc-browser, etc.) and other things are not always working. Drag&drop is, for some reason, but not in Firefox, maybe there are different ways.