Best of the three major agnostic package formats. If it brings more focus to Linux development, I don’t see how it can be a bad thing. A bit more space needed but for most setups this is a non-issue

I love flatpak. It makes it easier for Linux to become mainstream.

As a non-technical user: fucking love it.

It’s fantastic, for two reasons:

• There’s so much great software available through it, and I can always get the latest version regardless of my distro - or an older version if it hasn’t kept up with its dependencies.
• It’s part of the tooling that allows me to update my operating system without risk of it breaking (i.e. I can use an atomic distro because of it).

@tet its great because you can listen to people whine about it now instead of systemd

I really like the idea of a universal app format and flatpak seems the best for it. And flathub has been great as a repo.

The idea of separate system layer (with traditional packages) and user app layer with flatpaks seems like the way to go. Perhaps even immutable system layer.

I think it’s a good way for people to release software for Linux without having to deal with specific distro stuff (which historically has pretty much been “just provide a .deb for Ubuntu and a .tar.gz for other people to figure out”).

I’m hoping that it pushes for more people porting stuff to Linux because it’s a single target that gives you access to Steam Decks, Chromebooks and desktops.

I don’t think it makes sense for things that aren’t desktop applications such as servers or libraries, just because those tend to be open source, don’t need to be that up to date and benefit from tighter system integration. I see it as something that sits on top of other package managers rather than replacing them.

For Flathub? Eh, if they turn out to be bad we can just all move to another server, we’re not snap. :P I’m willing to bet that someone has already made a flatpak repo for Citra and Yuzu.

People need to realize that before Flatpak, distributing a small-time Linux app was a nightmare. Appimages were your best option if you wanted to avoid distro specific builds, PPAs and AUR, etc. Ever since packaging 2009scape on Flathub I haven’t looked back. It auto updates. People can find it from software centers. It works on all distros. It connects straight to upstream’s CICD. It even forced us to adopt XDG compliance so we could sandbox it better.

Yes, Flatpak has downsides like the download size (on disk it doesn’t matter because it gets compressed and the runtimes are shared, same as literally any other package manager). But overall, I hugely welcome it over the options we had before. Much love to the Flatpak and Flathub devs!

I personally prefer to use Flatpaks over traditional packages because of the added security, sandboxing, and overall convenience of not having to deal with dependency hell. It’s especially nice being able to have proprietary applications sandboxed from the rest of my system without worrying that Steam is snooping on my ‘super-important-tax-documents’.

Flatpaks are also very useful for having up-to-date packages on distros like Debian, and it’s derivatives. People can still use their preferred distro without having to worry about not getting a certain update, feature, bug fix, etc, for their applications.

Being able to restrict what applications have access to is a game-changer for me. A lot of times Flatpaks, by default, have very lenient permissions, and with the use of Flatseal I can restrict it to my liking. Worried about Audacity’s telemetry?? Turn network permissions off. Now, not all applications will work well (or at all) without internet connectivity, but for applications like Audacity, it works great!! Flatpaks can also be very useful for developers.

That’s not to say that Flatpaks are without their fair share of issues. Are they bloated?? Yeah, and although it’s not an issue for me, it may be for some people. Desktop integration is, meh. Themes, and fonts don’t always integrate the best. (A while back there were issues with Flatpak’s sandbox, but I won’t touch on that because I need to refresh my mind on it, and it was actively being developed to fix those issues so it possibly isn’t even an issue anymore.)

Overall I think Flatpaks are absolutely wonderful.

As a generalist I have to learn many concepts and dont have time to delve into any one that deep. Flatpak works and isnt proprietary like snap so I enjoy that. My recent debian+kde installation works well with if. Open discover and install flatpaks as much as you wish.

I definitely prefer it over Snaps or appimages. Straight-forward to update, and Flatseal provides a nice GUI to control permissions (if needed). Themes may not work properly, but whatever, not a big deal for me.

The distro’s repo is always my go-to. If it’s not available there, then flatpak, and I’ll use appimage under duress. If that doesn’t work, I’ll figure out a different solution.

Better than snaps and AppImages. Do I want every package on my system to be replaced by a Flatpak? No. Am I glad that I can ex. install Zotero as a Flatpak instead of having to build it myself? Yes.

I use them for some things and I think they are fine. Mostly apps that are kinda messy and I want to keep them and their atrocious dependency tree away from my base system. I also like to use them for proprietary apps or apps where I actually want to use the sandbox. Other than that I prefer native packages 99% of the time.

Flatpak is slower to update than pacman, the cli interface just doesn’t feel good to use. There is the weird naming, no real way to get a dependency tree, can’t hide those annoying eol messages even for apps that I specifically don’t want to update. Another thing is that not every app was made to run in a sandbox or it is just more difficult to use sometimes. A lot of people tend to cite ide’s, but in my case I was having issues with the steam flatpak. Running games with steam was fine, but anytime I wanted to hook up something third party eg: mods, cheat engine, etc. Doing so in the flatpak either required some tinkering around the sandbox or straight up didn’t work.

I feel like that last sentence sums up the whole experience. If you just need to point and click and have it work. Flatpak does that amazingly. If you need any kind of integration with other things, expect problems.

Edit: just wanted to add that, the whole point and click and work is fine for 99% of people which is why I and many others choose to use it.

While I don’t think flatpak shouldn’t replace traditional packages, I still like it.

Flatpak apps just work most of the time, they work without issues and are often very up to date. The sandboxing does have benefits because no apps interfere with it, the problem is that it doesn’t work super well with other apps, sometimes the theming is off, and it doesn’t work well with other apps, installing apps takes much longer, and it isn’t as easily started from the command line.

Edit: typo

Flatpak is fantastic for end-user GUI applications

Flathub is also great, but the fact that it’s really the only repo that flatpak maintainers are using concerns me. I know I’m dreaming, but I would love to see some sort of federated or P2P hosting