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There is some drawback. The main one : app can't communicate with each other.
Example firefox and his extension keepass. As keepass can't communicate with firefox, you have to open both apps and switch their windows.
You can use flatseal to manage communication between apps but that's not an easy process and may prove a security issue if you don't understand the technical jargon.
You only need flatseal on GNOME. KDE has it baked into the settings
Thank for the information. i didn't know since i use vanilla os :)
Kde has many things baked into the settings that gnome hasn't. GNOME is just more beautiful (and has PaperWM which is why I have to use GNOME)
1- It takes a lot of space. jUsT bUy a bIgGeR dRiVe --stfu I'm not going to spend money for you to waste it
1- a) Everyone assumes you're an American with 20Gbps symmetrical fiber optic. My internet can't handle 2+ Gb downloads for a fucking 50 Mb app bro
2- Duplicate graphics drivers. Particularly painful with Nvidia
3- It puts a lot of security work with distro library trees straight into the shitter
4- Horrendously designed system for CLI apps
(flatpak run org.whocares.shit.app)
5- Filesystem isolation has many upsides for security but also it can cause some pain (definitely nitpicking)
Where in America is there 20Gbps symmetrical fiber? Everywhere I know tops out at 1gbps if you are lucky that your ISP isn't shit, and lots of areas are still on slow cable.
In my area my options are 200mbps cable or 100mbps ADSL (which inexplicably costs more than the cable Internet)
All of this. Plus often it just doesn't work.
And no. I do not want to blind fiddle with the permissions to fix it.
Yes, I love it and don't get me wrong but there are many downsides and they all result from poor planning and/or bad decisions around how flatpak was built. Here are a few:
Flatpak acts as a restrictive sandbox experience that is mostly about "let's block things and we don't care about anything else". I don't think it's reasonable to have situations like applications that aren't picking the system theme / font without the user doing a bunch of links or installing more copies of whatever you already have. Flatpak in general was a good ideia, but the system integration execution is a shame.
The double-edged sword of isolation.
On the one hand, poor communication between apps and waste of storage.
On the other, relative safety from malicious applications, or from otherwise-safe applications built on top of a thousand libraries none of which have been audited by the dev.
I don't know how it's going to go down, but I suspect something will come along to address these issues and snatch the market away from Flatpak.
but I suspect something will come along to address these issues and snatch the market away from Flatpak.
I believe it could only be fixed by a team from GNOME or KDE, they're the one in a position to develop something like Flatpak but deeply integrated with the system instead of trying to get around it.
For what's worth Apple did a very good job when it came to the isolation and containerization of desktop applications, but again only possible because they control both sides.
Apple enforces a LOT of isolaton, they call it sandboxed apps and it is all based on capabilities, you may enjoy reading this. Applications get their isolated space at ~/Library/Containers and are not allowed to just write to any file system path they want.
A sandboxed app may even think it is writing into a system folder for preference storage for example - but the system rewrites the path so that it ends up in the Container folder instead. For example under macOS apps typically write their data to ~/Library/Application Support. A sandboxed app cannot do that - and the data is instead written beneath the ~/Library/Containers/app-id path for that app.
And here's how good Apple is, any application, including 3rd party tools running inside Terminal will be restricted:
I bet most people weren't expecting that a simple ls would trigger the sandbox restrictions applied to the Terminal application. The best part is that instead of doing what Flatpak does (just blocking things and leaving the user unable to to anything) the system will prompt you for a decision.
I believe this was the best way to go about things but it would require to get a DE team to make it in a cohesive and deeply integrated with the system. Canonical could do it... but we all know how Canonical is.
For me it's lacking in user friendliness. Go easy on the downvotes if I'm doing it the hard way.
flatpak command to run them.flatpak run firefox, I have to use the full app-id which could be quite long.Yes, I could make this simpler with scripts or aliases but how hard would it have been for Flatpak to automatically do this for me?
I'm using KDE and when I download a flatpak it automatically creates a .desktop file. I think gnome does this too if I'm not mistaken. I do have to restart or relogin for it to put the file there but that's not that bad IMO.
It's HUGE. That's the biggest downside for me. I'm always use a deb/native package first because they are way smaller.
Of course they are. they share dependencies with other software. flatpaks bundle all dependencies,which is great for sandboxing,even though some sort of break the rule and share some,they are still sandboxed.
Unless you "firejail" or "bubblewrap" your software, security is much better OOB for flatpaks.
That's a myth. Security of flatpaks depends entirely on the given permissions, and since most flatpaks just set their own permissions on installation, or require filesystem access to work, there is no meaningful difference in security OOB.
Flatpak apps cannot set their own permissions "on installation". If flatpak tells you some weather app uses only the network permission then that is all the app is going to get.
For an app to be able to change its own permissions, it first needs permission to the flatpak overrides directory. Any app that does this gets an "Unsafe" designation in gnome-software.
Also about most apps requiring filesystem access to work: I have 41 flatpak apps on my system (Silverblue so everything is flatpak). Only 6 have access to my home or Documents directory. (11 apps requested full filesystem or homedir permission, but 5 of these work perfectly fine after I turned off their permissions in Flatseal).
Notably, "large attack surface" apps like Thunderbird or Firefox don't have access to my Documents. File uploads and email attachments go through the file picker portals.
The worst part of flatpaks is that they don't get to see the actual path of files that they open. Instead, they get a /var/run/1000/blah proxy. The proxy is forgotten after you reboot, so any flatpak that memorized that path is holding a bunch of dead links.
Flatpak probably has it's specific uses like trying to use one piece of proprietary software that you don't trust and don't want to give it too much access to your system, or most GUI software clients having an easy way to install Discord on your Steam Deck (no terminal usage, Linux is easy yay), but native packages 99% of the time work better.
It's great for user apps, gui apps, and sandboxing. It's terrible for cli apps, libraries, development, and integration.
Startup time and disk space.
Some people don't like it because it uses a bit more storage and can start a bit slower, (I think) they can't be used for system packages, and I've also had some issues with theming
This should be pinned somewhere https://blogs.gnome.org/wjjt/2021/11/24/on-flatpak-disk-usage-and-deduplication/?ref=ypsidanger.com
Edit: the speed shouldn't be a real issue. You may measure a difference but that's not an issue as it was with snaps until they improved upon it.
I think its biggest weakness is also its biggest strength: isolation. Sometimes desktop integration doesn't work quite right. For instance, the 1password browser extension can't integrate with the desktop app when you use flatpak firefox.
For me, the question is why I should add an extra layer of complexity. If the things I use already work well using apt, and if most things are bundled in the default distro install, then my life is already good.
This all depends on your software needs, if course. Some people are using a lot of new stuff, so the above setup leads to annoying situations.
For OS components / packaging every part, Snaps may work, but for GUI apps they seem subpar and nobody really cares.
Nix may be way better for installing just anything compartimentalized, but there is no permission system (thats why packaging is easier).
But Flatpaks are really great overall, Bubblewrap, KDE Settings / Flatseal, Portals, official app support. Its really really important.
I’ve had my first downside with flatpak.
VSCode’s flatpak version won’t let you use certain packages because they’re installed on the system and flatpak is a sandbox with no access. You need to enable some stuff but I’m far too lazy to troubleshoot that shit.
I got the Snap version so I’m ready for the hate.
the main drawbacks I see are related to the sandboxing of apps, e.g. that several firefox addons that I just, such as the KeePassXC connector don't work in flatpak packaged firefox, because they require native messaging support which is unavailable in flatpak. There is a three year old bug report on this at github, and an even older bug report in the Firefox bugzilla. Unfortunately, there seems to be no capacity to solve this or this is not a priority, although this problem affects quite a few users. I have similar issues with the Flatpak packages Nextcloud client: Do to the poor system integration, neither autostart works not integration with Nautilus or other file managers, unless you do some manual tinkering (which isn't particularly difficult, but with native packages it will just work™ out of the box.) These issues have been known for many years, yet there seems to be no activity to solve them.
Why isn’t this just the default?
One may notice that for every new method, the old ways stay around, possibly forever. It is not the default because there were things that worked prior to flatpak. The distros that from before flatpak have likely added the capability, but won't likely change their default for another decade, or more.
IMO yes but it might not be an issue for you, flatpaks work like windows standalone executables where each app brings all their dependencies with them, the advantage is the insane stability that method provides, the downside is the huge size the app will ultimately take, flatpaks are compressed and they don't really bring all their dependencies with them (because they can share runtimes) but the gist of it is a flatpak is usually much heavier than a system (.deb .rpm .PKG) package.
If you are ok with tweaking I recommend nix pkgs as they work on any distro and only take slightly more space than system packages. I have a terrible connection and low disk space, flatpaks aren't something I can use on the long run.
Oh and if you're wondering flatpak >>>> snap > appimages (IMO)
Yes. It is not pacman
There's still a few edge cases that Flatpak is not great for. The Flatpak version of Kdenlive video editor can't see Whisper, which it uses to generate subtitles. The Appimage and native builds work flawlessly.
I'm assuming these problems will be addressed eventually but it takes time.
They dont integrate well into your system like they should, (theming, bookmarks, storage, etc), and to fix that you gotta do some work arounds that should be done automatically
It is the default on atomic distros. And many people who got to know flatpaks use it as a default on traditional installs as well.
But there are still bugs and quirks with some apps. Not all apps have all the functionality as a traditional install. E.g. dolphin or terminals.
It is up and coming and gradually replacing traditional installs. You rarely find an app that you can't install via flathub.
There are theming issues with older flatpaks.
Edit:
I have no idea how to view logs in the terminal with flatpaks.
You can't easily run flatpaks by their common known names. You have to use the reverse flatpak name which is annoying and difficult.
All that was said here, plus sometimes they don't work. I've reported a bug where the kdenlive flatpak version doesn't render titles or fades - and that's on Debian Testing, Arch, and Asahi Fedora. Native version works perfectly, but forces me to download an untidy amount of KDE stuff on my gnome installs ; flatpak would've been a cool solution to that.
I am yet to report another where Ardour nukes pipewire, at least on Asahi, but on Arch it was misbehaving also. Native, distro-provided version works perfectly.
I don't trust flatpak because no one single publisher can test every possible config, and I'm afraid distros become "lazy" and stop packaging native versions of stuff since it's a lot of work.
I believe it's the packaging process. It favors the standatd procedure of builds, and does not take account of various build systems (Seems C-centered). Seems this is why many apps end up providing AppImages instead.
Bloated and unnecessary if freeSW or openSW. That's what system shared libraries are for. If sandboxing is a thing, then firejail is availble, which can be combined with apparmor if looking for extra MAC security.
Endlessly reading on social media that is not a good from Linux "gurus". LOL
It's been great for me, but I wish it had a official gui for permissions management.
Flat pack install OBS? works awesome! Try to install plug in afterward not so much.
As everything in life, yes, there is downside. Major downside is that it can occupy more space in your hd or ssd.
However I think the downsides are not that bad to justify all the hatred some guys have.
Flatpak positive sides are way more relevant then the downsides
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.
I'm a little put off by the inconvenient command line and the mandatory bells and whistles (flathub is nice and all, but must it be baked into the main executable rather than having the package manager as an optional thing on top?).
So far, AppImage just looks superior to me. Works without installing a runtime into my system, no need to become root and integrate an app into a system-wide managed package repository, I can just run it.
I've used flatpak for a while because it's the default ob Fedoras GUI Software Center, but I've recently switched back to dnf and native packages where I can.
The thing is, that I have a shitty 500GB SSD with a shitty 50Mbit Internet connection (which is closer to 30Mbit because my house still has lead cables instead of copper). So downloading 300+ MB of libraries for a 2MB Program is just not feasible for me.
Take a look at this site that goes into the details of the shortcomings of Flatpak, its from 2020 but I'm sure some of this is relevant still
The biggest downside is that it's only for distributing applications with a graphical user interface. Command line utilities still need another method of distribution.
I don't use Flatpak much, but I rarely see issues. Sometimes I see minor things like themes not quite being right, but its never been bad enough for me to spend the time to fix it.
I suppose another downside is the need to have the base runtime packages, so it could take more disk space if each app uses a different one. In practice apps will share runtimes though.