|
|
|
|
|
|
by Jach
77 days ago
|
|
|
I've generally preferred AppImages because they're just a single-file (in appearance) binary I can put in a ~/bin folder and run. Flatpaks require using an external tool to run them, and update them, and there's confusion whether you need the --user flag or not, and after every graphics driver update on the main OS you need to upgrade all the flatpaks again... It's so much of a hassle. The permissions isolation is nice in theory but firejail works for that too, arguably better in some ways. In the space of retro gaming, the DuckStation devs recently had some drama (I think primarily with Arch users) and it resulted in purging the flatpak builds, now there's only an AppImage. I'm sure much righteous rage etc. like this post but against Flatpak or who knows. |
|
|
Flatpaks are updated at the same time as the system with the GNOME and KDE update GUIs, or in one step from the command line with "flatpak update" (or "sudo dbus-launch flatpak update" when running outside a graphical environment), and I've never run into problems with graphics drivers, though I've admittedly only used them on systems with Intel and AMD GPUs supported by in-tree drivers (but what you're saying makes sense because Flatpak runtimes do bundle user-mode graphics driver components).
While you're not wrong that running Flatpaks requires an external tool, installing them creates both symlinks to wrapper scripts in a common directory that can be added to your PATH and launchable desktop application icons in GNOME and KDE that work no differently than those for applications installed through other means.
The wrapper scripts and symlinks have qualified names, e.g. "io.mpv.Mpv", but that's trivially fixed with an alias or additional symlink if desired.
The only problems I've run into with Flatpaks are limitations due to sandboxing, e.g., the Wireshark Flatpak can't capture packets, which makes it useless in common scenarios.
"--user" is for working with per-user Flatpaks, rather than system-wide Flatpaks, which I've personally never had any reason to use since all my Fedora systems are personal, but it doesn't seem any more confusing than similar switches in other package management systems.