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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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What are your thoughts on Flatpak/Flathub? (flathub.org)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

215 comments fedilink hide all child comments

How does it stack up against traditional package management and others like AUR and Nix?

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Some of the under-the-hood implementation of Flatpak irritates me, like why the hell are we installing software in /var? Using it with the terminal is a pain because of the org.something.SomeThing shit it does, and I think Flatpak gives you all the drawbacks of app sandboxing with none of the benefits. It likes to not see the whole file structure; for instance I found the Flatpak version of Steam to be unusable because it wouldn't see anywhere I wanted to put my games library. That needs to be fixed.

That said, I think it's the better of the three all-distro package managers, it's got a central repository and package manager unlike Appimage so it's a place to publish and get stuff, and it's not tied to Canonical so it's obviously better than Snap.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

https://github.com/trytomakeyouprivate/flatalias

Try this script I wrote and help improve it!

if you want to change app permissions, use Flatseal and add the needed directory. This is very easy. If it is something all users generally need, open a bug on their repo.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Installing a separate program to make the first program work the way it should in the first place, and opening bugs in repos, is abolutely 100% things end users are willing to do.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

KDE has flatpak settings included, GNOME is doing their thing with unix philosophy and all. Flatseal works fine.

As I said, you should not need to edit those settings, maybe you need to, and if it generally makes sense (for example GNUmeric only has documents access, nothing else) this needs to be fixed.

Will not happen often for common apps

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Reminds me of this XKCD.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

The state of flatpak permissions currently is like that. They can never read each others storage, much like on Android with /storage/emulated/0/Android/data. So it you keep stuff stored inside these apps its safe.

Until they can use portals, many have permissions to read/write everything

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

It likes to not see the whole file structure; for instance I found the Flatpak version of Steam to be unusable because it wouldn't see anywhere I wanted to put my games library. That needs to be fixed.

That has been fixed with the introduction of Portals: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/portal-api-reference.html