[apatheticonion]

Ignoring Snaps - what are Flatpaks like today?

Totally understand the value in a distribution model like Flatpaks and am willing to adopt them but I haven't had the smoothest experience with them in the past so I tend to avoid them right now.

The last time I tried them was longer than 12 months ago - I installed Discord and it was missing some features at the time due to sandboxing (I don't remember exactly, it was either push-to-talk, hot-mic, or showing what game you were playing that didn't work).

I also had some other issues with other Flatpaks - I think there were theming issues.

How is it today? Can I install VSCode, Chrome, VLC, Steam, Discord as flatpaks and have no idea they are Flatpaks?

[notnullorvoid]

I used to have issues with Steam flatpak, but it's been 2-3 years now without any issues.

Discord also works, it doesn't support some features, but that has nothing to do with flatpak and everything to do with Discord on Linux in general.

I've got a dozen or so other flatpak apps that work flawlessly.

One major complaint though is it can keep old unused versions of runtimes around and you manually have to remove them, Nvidia and Mesa runtimes for some reason consistently have this issue. Even running `flatpak uninstall --unused` does not remove them.

[schmorptron]

In my experience you'll sadly still run into issues when running apps that weren't designed by the original authors to be used as flatpaks due to the permission issues you mentioned.

I see it as a necessary evil since a proper permissions system will make the attack surface for desktop apps much smaller in the long run, and the flatpak portals have the advantage of being much more visible and controllable by ordinary users than AppArmor or selinux (if there were even profiles) before them.

[addicted]

I’ve found using FlatSeal eliminates my issues with flatpak. And that’s despite me running flatpak on an Ubuntu install which I try hard to de-snap (yeah, I should switch to another distro but I’ve been using Ubuntu off and on for 2 decades and old habits die hard).

That being said I don’t see FlatSeal as a solution to the permission issues but merely a bandaid until a proper first citizen solution is developed by flatpak.