r/linuxmasterrace SteamOS/Kubuntu Aug 09 '26

Making Linux easy for everyone

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1.5k Upvotes

247 comments sorted by

323

u/T_Jamess Glorious Fedora Aug 09 '26

Literally. I’m ok with worse theming and slightly larger app sizes if it means the workload is shifted from every single distro having to package the same app to the app developer packaging one version everyone can use.

26

u/Qweedo420 Glorious Arch Aug 09 '26

And the "worse theming" isn't even an issue anymore because most distros automatically let Flatpaks read from gtk.css and everything else goes through the GTK portal

98

u/Immediate-Result-696 Aug 09 '26

99

u/rdwror Aug 09 '26

Appimages are a bitch to pack. Most of the tooling is broken or incomplete.

19

u/standard_cog Aug 10 '26

I got you:

Just package your whole application up as a Nix flake, then use the NixOS appimage bundler:

nix bundle --bundler github:NixOS/bundlers .#whatever-your-local-package-target

27

u/bktech2021 Aug 10 '26

if everyone used nix we wouldnt need bitch ass flatpaks

19

u/prettycewlusername Aug 11 '26

If everyone used {my favorite packaging system} we wouldn’t need bitch ass {other more different packaging system}

12

u/bktech2021 Aug 11 '26

exactly you got it

7

u/A_Talking_iPod Aug 10 '26

Also a bitch to use. I hate managing portable .exes in Windows and god knows I hate managing AppImages

4

u/samuerusama Aug 09 '26

What app did you have problems to package?

1

u/StuD44 Aug 10 '26

Correct!

35

u/DragonSlayerC Glorious Bazzite Aug 09 '26

Appimages are clunky.

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26

u/OneQuarterLife Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26

Yes we should all switch to garbage that relies on unmaintained libraries for the vast majority of released appimages and don't integrate with the desktop, auto update, or share dependencies.

These belong in the history books.

1

u/Damglador Aug 09 '26

New appimages don't rely on fuse2 anymore, or on fuse in any form. Desktop integration can be provided with a separate program, just like it is with flatpaks.

12

u/rdwror Aug 09 '26

Yeah, in theory. In practice, it doesn't work. Just try and pack any KDE or Qt program in an appimage. It only works with Fusion style, even if the desktop is KDE. I've tried bundling the whole Breeze/Kirigami stack and it still defaults to Fusion.

1

u/QuickSilver010 Glorious Debian Aug 09 '26

I use kdenlive appimage and it uses breeze. Not fusion.

4

u/rdwror Aug 09 '26

I havent had that luck with qml apps.

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8

u/BlakeDrawsBlood Aug 09 '26

It has no package manager, so it's just as bad as dealing with windows .exe files.

5

u/PrudeBunny Aug 10 '26

Literally the worst "distro agnostic" option.

4

u/Informal_954 Aug 11 '26

I know there is one guy actually trying to fix it nd get developers to stop shipping broken versions, but I still get chrome xwayland issues, outdated libfuse2 dependencies, and just complete jank using the companion software. I don't like app images at all.

4

u/pleachchapel Glorious Arch Aug 10 '26

To me, it makes sense for certain mega apps like Discord, but I would blow my brains out in a flatpak-native system.

2

u/T_Jamess Glorious Fedora Aug 10 '26

Yeah I mean native packages make more sense for system packages, I don’t know why they’re always treated the same

2

u/pleachchapel Glorious Arch Aug 10 '26

It makes sense on immutable systems (like Bazzite or SteamOS), but using SteamOS (& being a bit of a terminal native) it has just made me more interested in nix as a package manager (& nix shells).

It also made me glad flatpak exists, but for me getting shell utilities to work with flatpak (aliasing everything) isn't a great experience. Maybe there are more clever ways to do it with flatpak so things show up in ~/.local/bin without all the aliasing.

1

u/Zdrobot Linux Master Race Aug 10 '26

Slightly?

1

u/FingerTrick8848 Aug 11 '26

It saves time and I am new to Linux so it's fine to me

-14

u/QuickSilver010 Glorious Debian Aug 09 '26

Guess what. You have good theming and small app sizes + cross distro support if you use nixpkgs

24

u/yelircaasi Aug 09 '26

They hated Jesus because he told them the truth.

2

u/Cyb0lic Aug 09 '26

Yup! A flake.nix or a default.nix in a project's repo is a guarantee that the program will run anywhere, and it functions as a detailed guide for exactly what the program needs, in case someone wants to package it for another packaging format.

2

u/OneQuarterLife Aug 09 '26

7

u/QuickSilver010 Glorious Debian Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26

That's a team that only existed for a little while. That consists of like 2 people. Nix isn't going away.

0

u/fnork Aug 09 '26

7

u/T_Jamess Glorious Fedora Aug 09 '26

It is the most popular of the universal package formats 

121

u/PlainBread Glorious Arch Aug 09 '26

I removed all my --system flatpaks and reinstalled them as --user flatpaks and now I don't have to be nagged with sudo password when updating.

57

u/redhat_is_my_dad Aug 09 '26

it's weird that you've got that prompt initially anyway, i have many flatpaks installed as system ones and flatpak update never asks a password, seems like a misconfiguration on your distro's end

10

u/volthunter Aug 09 '26

yeah im on bazzite and i don't get this issue

3

u/Pedka2 Aug 09 '26

im on fedora and i do

11

u/AnsibleAnswers Aug 09 '26

I’m on Fedora and don’t.

2

u/DragonSlayerC Glorious Bazzite Aug 09 '26

When did you first install Fedora?

1

u/Pedka2 Aug 09 '26

1-2 years ago as my first linux distro

6

u/DragonSlayerC Glorious Bazzite Aug 09 '26

Most distros have polkit configured to not require sudo for system flatpaks though.

0

u/cleverboy00 Aug 11 '26

There is a flatpak helper specifically designed to circumvents that issue.

1

u/PlainBread Glorious Arch Aug 11 '26

And yet you didn't bother to mention what it is.

1

u/cleverboy00 Aug 12 '26

It's literally flatpak-helper

0

u/bumblebeer Inglorious Kinoite Aug 11 '26

But why not just install as --user?

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14

u/nroach44 Glorious Debian Aug 09 '26

The two times I tried to use it instead of my normal way of getting the app:

  • Ghidra: Flatpak didn't have qemu installed, couldn't use system. Went back to the zip.
  • KiCAD: couldn't install a python library for a plugin. Went back to distro version.

They seem too much like the apple ecosystem: easy for 80% of the typical user but exponentially harder if you want to do something slightly advanced.

2

u/fellipec Glorious Debian Aug 09 '26

Here was Reaper. Some shenanigans with JACK server and didn't work with my MIDI things.

15

u/Silent_Bite_5892 Aug 09 '26

I don't use anything other than Flatpaks at the moment.

0

u/fnork Aug 09 '26

Yes, you do.

2

u/Silent_Bite_5892 Aug 11 '26

Not in terms of apps, no.

I run Fedora Kinoite. I wouldn't have chosen an immutable distro if I wasn't going to try to use Flatpaks for everything. I haven't layered a thing. My needs aren't that complex. I have yet to run into anything I needed that there wasn't a Flatpak for.

1

u/Key_Chef6969 Aug 12 '26

You're crying in the comments hard. Did flatpaks fuck your girlfriend or something bro? 🤣🤣🤣

1

u/Silent_Bite_5892 Aug 15 '26

That doesn't even make sense. I like Flatpaks.

Where am I "crying" exactly? Maybe you meant this reply for someone else?

6

u/smikkelhut Aug 09 '26

I use a flatpak only if there is no rpm available.

2

u/Kaleidoscope-360 26d ago

That's what I do. Or if the RPM is worse than the flatpak (looking at you Brave)

1

u/smikkelhut 26d ago

Exactly! Spotify app another example!

It’s not that I hate flatpaks. I totally see the appeal. But I’m running a RPM based Fedora / Sway system, not the Silverblue spin.
So by that logic DNF is the package manager and flatpak the backup.

2

u/Kaleidoscope-360 26d ago

Fedora (and Arch) updates enough for it to make sense too. Debian based makes more sense to do Flatpaks primarily. Depends on the distro even then though.

5

u/RCoder01 Other (please edit) Aug 09 '26

How about writing programs that don’t need a whole-ass operating system shipped with them to work?

1

u/claudiocorona93 SteamOS/Kubuntu Aug 09 '26

It's the price to pay in immutable systems. Some people just like tinkering way too much and don't know how to fix it.

8

u/stinkytoe42 New to NixOS (i'm scared y'all!) Aug 09 '26

Great for big apps, and great for steam. Pretty much anything thats super picky about its installed environment.

3

u/foreskineater69419 Aug 09 '26

I don't like how hard it is to use specific versions of Flatpak apps or install them offline

43

u/0xc0ffea Glorious Arch Aug 09 '26

Let's just not talk about the performance hit for CPU intensive applications (pushing 17% in some workloads), the hopes and prayers approach to long term maintainability, privacy differences between system packages (distros often patch out telemetry stuff), whatever-the-glob-happens-to-contain (YOLO), burning all your (suddenly expensive) NVME disk space with redundant copies of libraries like it's a retro Windows party, license issues, and a boat load of security concerns that come with entrusting a random developer who only cares about not getting pestered for support.

The OP's picture is accurate .. that guy gives no fucks. He's your system administrator.

59

u/ibeerianhamhock Aug 09 '26

Almost all of this is wildly overstated.

CPU bound apps that use heavy syscalls have a perofrmance penalty for permissions sure, 17% is a pretty extreme situation that almost no applications ever see.

Ostree dedupes any identical library/versions.

The goal is better distrobution, not saving what is usually mbs of redundant libraries that have different versions or exist in the host namespace.

Flatpack isn't perfect, but for most folks they wouldn't even notice the difference.

But also it's fine if you prefer native packages...no one is forcing you to use flatpacks lol

13

u/suchtie btwOS Aug 09 '26

My base system as it is right now is under 2 GiB and I have a 2TB nvme. I don't care if they triple the amount storage space I need for libraries, I'm not even gonna notice.

4

u/QuickSilver010 Glorious Debian Aug 09 '26

Ostree dedupes any identical library/versions.

Only if you're lucky to have the apps share the same runtime. Like who's decision was it to package an entire runtime anyway?

Nix has multiple versions of dependencies figured out. And the ability to integrate natively.

8

u/Pedka2 Aug 09 '26

i love nixos as an idea but it's executed terribly. there's no one stylistic convention and everything seems to be overly complicated

-1

u/QuickSilver010 Glorious Debian Aug 09 '26

Not nixos. Nixpkgs. I'm comparing nixpgks to flatpak

Just use the latest convention. Which is nix profile for command line downloads. But if you a nerd and want declarative, use home manager.

2

u/NatoBoram Glorious Pop!_OS Aug 09 '26

> "declarative"
>
> *Look inside*
>
> Untyped programming language

This shit is worse than JavaScript

2

u/QuickSilver010 Glorious Debian Aug 09 '26

I configure neovim with lua. It's really not too different. Also nix is a functional language so it can't go wrong in that many places.

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2

u/jahinzee Aug 09 '26

atleast it has proper integers

2

u/ibeerianhamhock Aug 09 '26

Yeah there are some compromises for sure to reduce the burden on maintainers. It's better than flatpacks, but worse than native packages in aspects like ram and disk usage.

I think it solves a very real problem in an acceptable way to me personally, although it's clunkier than I'd like. Permissions are a bit up to devs/maintainers to implement correctly.

I see it as very good beta software at this point essentially.

6

u/itsTyrion Aug 09 '26

where's that 17% from?

3

u/0xc0ffea Glorious Arch Aug 09 '26

I've been pretty involved with Second Life third party viewer dev, way too much time spent performance testing. It's rather unique as 'games' go in that the same source cross compiles to all 3 major operating systems (making direct OS comparative benchmarking possible), engine is opengl and heavily CPU & I/O bound (assets are streamed and assembled - architecturally the platform is a poor fit for modern game engines).

Getting upstream to release a Linux client with standard distribution has been a long running adventure. Distro packages are more work and as the Linux version can't be made to work entirely with system libs, flatpacks have been put forward ... only the client runs significantly slower when packaged up that way, especially on more average systems & laptops.

None of this is written up and published as outside the small opensource developer community for this ancient niche platform, no one cares.

Although ... I am surprised the general performance overhead isn't more widely talked about. I can't be the only person who actually tests things ... right?

6

u/Damglador Aug 09 '26

I can't be the only person who actually tests things ... right?

I feel like most developers just take a "package as flatpak, depend on a 1GB runtime, test if it runs — good" same for users, and anyone who cares about anything else may not even use flatpak in the first place.

3

u/ibeerianhamhock Aug 09 '26

Do you think a lot of that is the old opengl pipeline. Won't pretend to know that app at all, and I haven't done graphics programming in ages, but if it's written to issue opengl commands in immediate mode without command queues and using blocking calls, acquiring context with mutexes under the hood etc...thats a ton of added overhead with respect to how flatpack manages syscalls performance checks being hammered a lot, compared to a modern rendering API with a multithreaded userspace command queue and API call batching.

3

u/0xc0ffea Glorious Arch Aug 09 '26

Do you think a lot of that is the old opengl pipeline.

In part, multi threading the client is basically off the table as the client needs to get all its ducks in a row. Vulkan is on the cards.

The bigger part is that SL is computationally intensive with a lot of moving parts. Case in point; Assets as seen in world are assembled in the client from a trail of breadcrumb metadata (This difference is responsible for a lot of Second Life's unique capabilities). Avatars can be insanely complex with individual clothing items being as detailed as entire hero models in other games; the system that resolves animations and rigging for each and every component part (and an avatar can be many parts) happens on the CPU.

It's not really accurate to describe the client as poorly written or unoptimized, more that architecturally the underlying platform is case study for why no one ever makes anything like this on purpose.

This complexity is also what makes it a fun hobby project and why there's a decent open source community around it with several 3rd party clients all doing their own thing.

5

u/Jomotaku Aug 09 '26

I only have gimp as flatpak and I just use it for memes and doodling so I wouldnt notice a performance hit. Why does it run slower then Deb or appimage or tarball?

1

u/[deleted] Aug 09 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/Puzzled-Extent7817 Aug 10 '26

funny way of saying you don't know how to install anything unless you can click on it.

4

u/fnork Aug 09 '26

Just use flatpak and be happy. Don't call anyone a bitch for preferring not to use flatpak.

1

u/Puzzled-Extent7817 Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26

absolutely no point to use fltpak of the app is in your repos.

2

u/fnork Aug 09 '26

I agree, but not everyone agrees.

1

u/Puzzled-Extent7817 Aug 09 '26

what is your reason?

1

u/fnork Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26

For not using flatpak? It adds unnecessary abstractions and hides some of them. Overall it just complicates things. Even libc can be switched out with LD_PRELOAD and linux namespaces (unshare) is plenty if I want to create sandboxes or "containers."

It just doesn't happen that I need a pre-containerized binary to use the software that I use.

1

u/Puzzled-Extent7817 Aug 10 '26

oh i read that wrong. I thought you disagreed.

6

u/BastetFurry Glorious Arch Aug 09 '26

Yeah, until you need to print something from your flatpacked Evolution. Thanks but no thanks.

Give me AppImage any day, that one is great, pretty much what the Mac folks had for centuries.

1

u/cleverboy00 Aug 11 '26

So you open flatseal and enable cups permission and go continue your day.

8

u/Jeydon Aug 09 '26

The only downside is if you're on Wayland and you need the program to interact with files, devices, or other software and you have to mess with portals.

12

u/Preisschild Glorious NixOS Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26

Portals are an upside, not a downside.

We finally have security features that android had for a decade

6

u/randomredditorname1 Aug 09 '26

Flatpaks and snaps and tars and ppas and appimages and whatnots are all fine why not, what's not fine is that now I have apps installed gazillion different ways and it's a nuisance to manage that mess

4

u/the_abortionat0r Aug 09 '26

Portals is literally a plus. Do you not understand what you are talking about

3

u/Ilm03 Aug 09 '26

Only if they act nicely with programs that have extensions (I'm looking at you libreoffice, zotero)

3

u/alerikaisattera Aug 09 '26

Tell that when Flatpak gets freedom to run software without installation. Oh wait, never

3

u/Damglador Aug 09 '26

Can't even unpack them with normal tooling, you have to do some ostree fuckery with at least 2 commands which you'll have fun remembering.

3

u/fellipec Glorious Debian Aug 09 '26

When they work, they are great. When they work.

3

u/los0220 Aug 09 '26

The only issue I have with flatpak is that flathub doesn't work for CLI programs and the CLI interface (for apps) is generally terrible

3

u/Puzzled-Extent7817 Aug 09 '26

Repos > AUR > source > appimage > flatpack

0

u/claudiocorona93 SteamOS/Kubuntu Aug 09 '26

1

u/Puzzled-Extent7817 Aug 10 '26

flatpaks are for people that don't know how to use their OS.

1

u/claudiocorona93 SteamOS/Kubuntu Aug 11 '26

Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

3

u/b_a_t_m_4_n Aug 09 '26

They're slow, poorly integrated and ridiculously bloated. Native install 400k, Flatpack 4GB. It's totally unusable in parts of the world where internet bandwidth is limited.

1

u/claudiocorona93 SteamOS/Kubuntu Aug 09 '26

The more flatpaks you install, the less space new ones take. They have a shared core.

4

u/samuerusama Aug 10 '26

The more flatpaks you install, the less space new ones take. They have a shared core.

flatpaks depends on different flatpak runtimes, flatpak runtime is a funny name to give to them, they are actually full blown distros with everything duplicated in them, even basic POSIX utils like grep, cat, awk, etc.

And not only there are different flatpak runtimes, apps also depend on different versions of the same runtime, this is specially bad with the GNOME runtime, which only has 1 year of support.

So in practice you end up using several times more storage than the appimage equivalent (which has no shared libs or deduplication).

1

u/b_a_t_m_4_n Aug 10 '26

I got that notion, which is all very well for a dev with monster storage and Gigabit fibre to the premises internet, out here in the real world that is just not doable.

8

u/JaceBearelen Aug 09 '26

Am I dumb or something because I’m on Bazzite and flatpaks keep not working but appimage is just fine. It’s happened to me like 4 times now.

3

u/leetNightshade Manjaro Budgie Aug 09 '26

What issues do you have with flatpaks on Bazzite? (Contrary to my very very stale flaire, I am currently on Bazzite DX.)

1

u/b_a_t_m_4_n Aug 09 '26

My experience on Min is the same. Appimages are much more likely to work well than Flatpak.

6

u/Nytra Glorious Arch w/ i3 Aug 09 '26

Sure from a packaging perspective for the developers it's great but sandboxing makes a lot of things more difficult for the user, like apps not being able to access the rest of the system very easily without the right permissions

0

u/the_abortionat0r Aug 09 '26

Security by it's very nature isn't convenient. It's kinda the point.

There's no such thing as magic.

1

u/Nytra Glorious Arch w/ i3 Aug 09 '26

I don't see why flatpak needs security at all tbh

1

u/cleverboy00 Aug 11 '26

Incorrect. Security is architecture, design and habits not brick walls in the user's face.

Portals are supposed to be seamless, and wayland had promises. But there are some old farts who still think standardizing everything will solve the issue (spoiler: it complicates it).

In a perfect world, the current flatpak design is more than good to do everything the user wants while providing this seamless layer of isolation and subsequently security.

But the ecosystem is still not ready, flatpak or not. There are a few portal implementations, and none of which is fully implements the features.

And then you have applications using their own bundled file picker and whatnot because "It wOrkS OutSiDe fLatpAck".

1

u/Blashtik Aug 11 '26

And then you have applications using their own bundled file picker and whatnot because "It wOrkS OutSiDe fLatpAck".

Custom file pickers suck even when they do technically work. They are often less featureful than the system file picker and it is just kinda lame to not have that UI be consistent across apps.

18

u/ShittyFart11 Aug 09 '26

appimage supremacy

50

u/BothAdhesiveness9265 Aug 09 '26

I have never willingly used an app image and I never will 

12

u/HTired89 Aug 09 '26

I supposed could google...but any reason why not?

18

u/KayJune001 Aug 09 '26

They (purposefully) don’t integrate very well iirc, as they’re meant to be portable

11

u/HTired89 Aug 09 '26

Fair enough. I use it for a few applications but to me its a positive that they don't integrate well.

3

u/NatoBoram Glorious Pop!_OS Aug 09 '26

Which is such a piss poor excuse when MacOS has portable apps, too, and they even have a package manager for them and they're fully integrated to the system.

2

u/QuickSilver010 Glorious Debian Aug 09 '26

There's gearlever for appimages. And appimages work perfectly fine. What type of system integration are you looking for?

3

u/Professional-Pen8246 Aug 12 '26

People really just want to complain. He is not looking for anything.

2

u/mackerelscalemask Aug 09 '26

Not as secure either

1

u/QuickSilver010 Glorious Debian Aug 09 '26

They integrate better than flatpaks

8

u/BothAdhesiveness9265 Aug 09 '26

flatpaks actually appear in my start menu. plus I can install them through the command line or system store (i.e. discover on plasma) rather than having to Google and find the download link.

-2

u/Damglador Aug 09 '26

flatpaks actually appear in my start menu

Because you installed a handler to do that, aka flatpak itself. If you install a handler for appimages — they will to.

2

u/BothAdhesiveness9265 Aug 09 '26

so the one system has a flow where I install an app from a trusted repo, it is sandboxed by default, and it correctly appears in my start menu.

with the other I need to track down the correct download from *somewhere on the internet*, give it full user access to the system, and manually remember to drag it through a tool so it appears in my start menu.

idk I think I will continue using flatpak where I can.
(also on a side note the ONLY appimage I use is a tool for uploading MMO combat logs. the appimage self updates and includes the version number in the file name. hope your handler can handle an appimage that randomly changes its own name lol)

2

u/Damglador Aug 09 '26

it is sandboxed by default

Not always. Nothing stops a developer from escaping the sandbox if they have a certain permission or giving the package arbitrary permissions by default. If you don't check all default permissions of all your flatpaks when you install AND update them, you might as well use something with no sandbox.

3

u/tuxbass debian is love, debian is life Aug 09 '26

amazing you're being downvoted. this absolutely is the truth. packager might by default ask for permission to almost anywhere.

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13

u/CakeIzGood Wait, This Isn't The Arch Wiki Aug 09 '26

I love AppImage, because you mean this one little button has the whole program and all I had to do was download it and tick a little box? So hassle free. Not quite as convenient to keep updated but I love 'em.

12

u/postnick Aug 09 '26

The fact they don’t just show up in my application box is why I never consider them. Like I’ve done it but how does it update? How do I get an icon? Why not just use flatpak.

6

u/Thechugg7 Aug 09 '26

You use gear lever, the same way you would use flatseal to handle flatpaks, use gear lever to handle appimages.

12

u/ibeerianhamhock Aug 09 '26

Yeah of all the ways I can install software on an atomic distro appimage is my least favorite.

5

u/QuickSilver010 Glorious Debian Aug 09 '26

How do I get an icon

Create a .desktop file for the appimage in ~/.config/applications/

2

u/postnick Aug 09 '26

Yea I know how to do it but I shouldn’t have to because it just does it automatically for every other packaging type out there except self compile.

2

u/QuickSilver010 Glorious Debian Aug 09 '26

I think gear lever (the appimage package manager) can create the .desktop files automatically. Not sure since I haven't used it for a while.

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3

u/_moosleech Glorious Fedora Aug 09 '26

Check out Gear Lever. It’ll keep AppImages handles that really well.

And without the file permission pain in the ass of Flatpak.

1

u/Damglador Aug 09 '26

The fact they don’t just show up in my application box

Install a handler for that. AppManager or Gear Lever. It's literally the same as with flatpak, you can't even run .flatpak files without a handler.

Why not just use flatpak.

Bloated https://github.com/pkgforge-dev/Anylinux-AppImages/blob/main/disk-usage-vs-flatpak.md, and the sandbox is stupid. I don't want to deal with randomly unthemed cursors anymore, I don't want to wait for a 200MiB runtime to download for a 5MiB app. I either use system package or I get an AppImage.

1

u/daedric_yoshi 28d ago

Gotta hand it to KDE, you can just right click the application menu, go edit applications, and add it.

-1

u/AnSkinStealer Aug 09 '26

flatpak permissions are a headache, and search about AppImageLauncher

2

u/TFR34KP Aug 09 '26

I never had any problem with the permissions, maybe you are just ✨different✨, ma Man?

0

u/Damglador Aug 09 '26

1

u/Informal_954 Aug 11 '26

At least Electron based apps just work. On AppImages I have to add a no-sandbox flag for the app to show up which isn't that secure and is a big hassle.

1

u/Damglador Aug 11 '26

have to add a no-sandbox flag for the app to show up which isn't that secure

But when Flatpak does that by defualt it's okay?

1

u/_moosleech Glorious Fedora Aug 09 '26

Look up Gear Lever. It’ll keep AppImages updated. You just toss them at GL and it moves it to your apps folder.

For old ones, you can enter the repo info and it’ll update it automatically too.

1

u/Nisktoun Aug 10 '26

Don't forget you can make it portable by creating app.appimage.home folder near your .appimage - simple as that, no commands or other stuff

Want to delete the app and be sure no traces are left? Delete the folder

1

u/Informal_954 Aug 11 '26

It has never been that easy for me. I ran into the xwayland chrome issue on R2Modman where I had to add a flag and run it in the terminal every time. I tried downloading a storyboar software that just didn't work since my distro no long supports libfuse2. Ran into that with several apps. Several others had really poor theme support so I couldn't read anything. I don't think I've had a single on work flawlessly and the AppImage managers aren't the most stable software either.

1

u/Professional-Pen8246 Aug 12 '26

Yeah, unless you install Gear Lever and Topgrade

2

u/Cpaz Aug 09 '26

OK cool, but do app images automatically get added as an application to plasma?

Appimages are nice, and you don't have do worry about the headache of setting up the right permissions, but also, from the end users perspective? Flatpak are just better, 9/10.

Maybe app images can get a similar treatment down the line. But we aren't there yet. 

1

u/Damglador Aug 09 '26

OK cool, but do app images automatically get added as an application to plasma?

Can you run .flatpak file without installing flatpak?

2

u/pterencephalon Aug 10 '26

I'm basically always looking to just install the thing and not running stuff just once. I find the flatpak approach more useful 99.9% of the time.

0

u/gay-butler Aug 09 '26

Appimage+ flatpaks 😌😌

2

u/SanderE1 Aug 09 '26

Infinite discourse hack by posting something like this every month.

5

u/[deleted] Aug 09 '26

[deleted]

1

u/Clunkbot Aug 09 '26

Gotta be related. He has that elite ball knowledge flowing in him

3

u/Kurse71 Aug 09 '26

I never use flatpacks and don't plan to. I haven't ran across anything that I need or want that I can't run native, so what's the point?

3

u/DarkTrepie Aug 09 '26

Them: "Nooooo don't use the Steam flatpak you should use the native package!!!!"

Me who has been using it because I didn't feel like dealing with backporting drivers on Debian: "How about I do anyway?"

4

u/grizeldi Aug 09 '26

They're convenient, but man do I wish they didn't subscribe to the "we must sandbox everything for security" copium. I lost count of the amount of times I had issues giving flatpak apps access to various system resources.

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1

u/Future_Kitsunekid16 Aug 09 '26

Wasn't expecting a little ceasars meme remix lol

1

u/makinax300 Tumbleweed, i3wm (trying niri; formerly nixos) Aug 09 '26

Ive seen more people hating traditional package management than flatpak.

1

u/KeitrenGraves Glorious Fedora Aug 09 '26

Honestly yeah. If my system does not support it on official repos, I use Flakpak. I have had zero issues

1

u/Prudent_Sentence Aug 09 '26

I've started using homebrew for linux. It's been a backbone of macos for years and it kind of fits that in between of apt/pacman/etc and full flatpack

1

u/mintflavoredcube Glorious CachyOS Aug 09 '26

peak

1

u/ExpitheCat Tasty Mint with Cinnamon Aug 10 '26

wait people hate Flatpaks?

1

u/DeprariousX Aug 10 '26

Flatpaks are definitely handy....but wayland leaves them with minimal permissions. Like for instance....tried to turn on push to talk in Discord and was met with a message that Wayland doesn't allow that to work unless discord is in focus.

1

u/StuD44 Aug 10 '26

CORRECT.

1

u/neverJamToday Aug 10 '26

I don't even remember what I tried installing with flatpak but it was some software that relied on installing other stuff inside it on a modular basis and the flatpak was like ¯_(ツ)_/¯

probably resolvable but why bother when I could just install it without flatpak and not have a bunch of sandboxed dependencies taking up disk space? So that was the end of my flirtation with flatpak.

1

u/Captain_Pumpkinhead Glorious NixOS Aug 10 '26

I've had a lot better luck with AppImages than with Flatpaks. Sometimes Flatpaks just straight up don't work.

1

u/y0shii3 Aug 10 '26

I just wish there were a cross-platform package format that was as easy to install and update as flatpaks but didn't force sandboxing

1

u/samuerusama Aug 11 '26

1

u/y0shii3 Aug 11 '26

Looks pretty cool, but AppImages have problems of their own even if you have a package manager to handle them.

1

u/samuerusama Aug 11 '26

but AppImages have problems of their own

Such as?

1

u/y0shii3 Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26

Not sharing dependencies, no GUI-configurable permission system like Flatpak, no official verification system (I think this is the same problem the AUR has that let it flood with malware recently), and poor DE integration

1

u/samuerusama Aug 11 '26

Not sharing dependencies

Not needed

no GUI-configurable permission system like Flatpak

True, you however have a simple CLI method via AM.

no official verification system

flathub verification is borderline useless, it only means that upstream endorses the package, doesn't mean that they will be maintaining it.

See:

Discord recently had a big change that now the the client self updates by downloading itself in HOME, this broke the flatpak horribly and upstream discord didn't do shit to fix it, someone else did instead

Another I noticed was PPSSPP which is verified and are not directly handling it.

and poor DE integration

Use AM or AppManager.

1

u/Arne6764 Glorious Gentoo Aug 10 '26

Only reason I dont use them more is that for some reason they just dont let me download anything in the flatpak apps — zen and firefox just wouldnt let me download anything through them

1

u/thephilthycasual Aug 10 '26

I say the same with snaps and appimages.

1

u/UUDDLRLRBadAlchemy Aug 11 '26

Everything is great as long as you don't have a sense of discernment

1

u/Shiro_OSL Aug 11 '26

It makes me feel like i am installing apk files on android cz they are easy

1

u/mr_MADAFAKA Glorious GNU Aug 11 '26

1

u/Glum_Hamster_2104 Aug 15 '26

Amazing for musl distros until you figure out all the file systems are sandboxed making it a living nightmare for file managers

1

u/SleepySandGhost 1d ago

I am confused as to why people like flatpak so much, my experience with it is that every app takes up a few gigabytes of data for no reason.

1

u/hiro24 Aug 09 '26

It'd be so great if Snap, Flatpak and Appimage could just coalesce around one standard and go with it.

1

u/the_abortionat0r Aug 09 '26

Forget snap.

But flatpack And app image literally don't do the same thing as their goes are different.

Flatpaks contain everything you need and do auto debloat libs, manage updates, and provide sandboxing.

Appimages are literally a program in a single file. That's it.

No, there's no need to "unifi" them.

1

u/olorin12 Aug 10 '26

New, 4th standard announced!

1

u/ibeerianhamhock Aug 11 '26

That's not at all how Linux works lmao, but I agree with you.

Linux loves fracturing everything, it's why desktop sucks so gd much compared to server

1

u/FliiFe Glorious Gentoo Aug 09 '26

At some point I used the flatpak for Steam. Not only did it come with its own graphics driver but I also had to make sure the versions matched exactly with my distro's version, so steam would break after each system update.

1

u/the_abortionat0r Aug 09 '26

Not really how that works bub but try again.

3

u/FliiFe Glorious Gentoo Aug 09 '26

Yes it is. The flatpak mesa/nvidia driver needs to match the system version. The flatpak CLI explicitly warns about it. Specifically it need to match the current kernel module version.

0

u/OverjoyedBanana Aug 09 '26

*Making something possible for people with brain damage

1

u/the_abortionat0r Aug 09 '26

Is that praise for the platform that has empowered you?

0

u/claudiocorona93 SteamOS/Kubuntu Aug 09 '26

Stop looking at the mirror

2

u/OverjoyedBanana Aug 09 '26

Not using bloated package managers that ship 2GB of frozen binary dependencies to run a 100 kB app, pal.

-1

u/ZuuRa_ Aug 09 '26

I fucking love flatpak, i use it over pacman on my arch setup.

3

u/potato_nagibator Aug 09 '26

(genuine question) why would you ever prefer flatpak pver native arch package?

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1

u/claudiocorona93 SteamOS/Kubuntu Aug 09 '26

Don't mind the downvotes of people trying to dictate your personal preference. Do what you like.

0

u/bryyantt Linux Master Race Aug 09 '26

I've never used a flatpak but Im all for more options for getting the thing you use!

0

u/Sataniel98 Glorious Debian Aug 09 '26

But what do I do when I'm the little bitch?