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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).

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.

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174

Is there a downside to Flatpak? (lemmy.world)

submitted 9 months ago by 0485919158191@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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Basically title.

I’m wondering if a package manager like flatpak comes with any drawback or negatives. Since it just works on basically any distro. Why isn’t this just the default? It seems very convenient.

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[–] gamma@programming.dev 7 points 9 months ago

Others have mentioned disk usage and desktop integration. There is some truth to them, but shared runtimes keeps disk uasge down (although worse than native apps). Desktop launchers now search /var/lib/flatpak/exports/share/applications by default, but I'm still having issues with themes in one or two niche apps.

Trust is the big one. The benefit of your distro's packages is that they are maintained by a limited number of maintainers. Flatpaks have a much, much larger number of maintainers, which is where sandboxing comes in. Flathub now marks apps with lax permissions as "potentially unsafe", which is a huge step in communicating this to the average user.

Most desktop apps can get away with having next to no access, as long as they support the appropriate XDG desktop portals.

Ultimately, your mileage will vary, as there are many classes of application which are ill-suited to being sandboxed. Program launchers, programming languages, IDEs, file managers are a few.