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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] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Aside from philosophical issues my experience with Flatpak has been excellent. There's some theming steps you need to do to make them feel like regular apps, which I feel is clunky design. No Flatpak-induced instability from what I can tell. Setting up directory permissions is sometimes slightly annoying but Flatseal makes it trivial, and most Flatpak permissions are set up properly out of the box these days.

I haven't noticed any start-time delays when launching Flatpaks as opposed to regular apps - I don't know if they've fixed that or if my system is just too powerful. The only app that I've personally noticed is weird is VSCodium, which has trouble escalating to admin permissions when you're trying to edit privileged files. I still use the regular version for that reason.

[+] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wasn't able to get the gsettings method to work (I'm on Wayland KDE), and that article doesn't say anything about theming QT Flatpaks. Also, after "installing" my GTK theme as a flatpak via the method described, it still wasn't available to my GTK Flatpaks via the GTK_THEME method. The steps in the itsfoss.com article do work, though there's been a lot of squabbles about the "proper" way to expose themes to Flatpaks. Regardless, this all goes back to my point that theming Flatpak is clunky and should be much smoother.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

GTK_THEME is a development env var, it’s not expected to work in many cases. For example GtkSettings:gtk-theme won’t even contain it so apps can be confused.

The post details exactly how it works but yes it’s only about GTK.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Right, I understand it's not supposed to be used in "proper" usage, but it does work for all my GTK apps and the gsettings method does not work for me. Unless I'm supposed to store it somewhere else because I'm on KDE.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You must not have xdg-desktop-portal-gtk.

I think one recent release was also bugged but it’s fixed if up to date.

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

I do have xdg-desktop-portal-gtk on Debian Stable, which is currently at 1.14.1-1. I'll look around to see if there's more documentation on this method, because I would prefer to not use the debug variables if possible.

Edit: I launched with GTK_DEBUG=interactive and I can see the theme inside the Flatpak gets set to Adwaita-empty instead of my actual theme, which does get properly returned via gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-theme

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The way to test what GTK actually gets is this command:

gdbus call -e -d org.freedesktop.portal.Desktop -o /org/freedesktop/portal/desktop -m org.freedesktop.portal.Settings.Read org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-theme

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

That gets my normal GTK theme properly. I found a little more discussion on this here. Nothing very actionable but I did also confirm that my xdg-desktop-portal-gtk is running. It seems like this is supposed to be working, but I have a mostly stock Debian 12.1 KDE install and something seems to be wrong somewhere in the chain. I've also tried multiple GTK Flatpaks with the same results.

Edit: Also, I have both my themes folder exposed and the theme installed as a Flatpak via the linked script.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I haven’t noticed any start-time delays when launching Flatpaks as opposed to regular apps

OPs case sounds like it's distro-specific, rather than Flatpak specific. Flatpaks don't do the Snap thing that bloats start time