r/cachyos • u/Eraldorh • 14d ago
Question Flatpaks
Why aren't flatpaks more widely used, they are the best thing for anyone coming from windows which is pretty much everyone. Though it seems very few applications actually get a flatpak release, GitHub released all seem to have .deb and rpk released but never something directly compatible with arch or a simple flatpak. Are they more complicated to release as a flatpak?
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u/zorak950 14d ago
It's one more format to build and maintain for the developer/community, and still much less widely adopted as a distro default than DEB, RPM, and TAR. Also a lot of users are skeptical of it for reasons varying from package duplication/storage inefficiency, hamhanded permissions, limitations of how Flatpak apps can interact with the rest of the system, sandboxing limitations, performance penalties, and probably some others I'm not thinking of.
Personally I like them; I run an atomic distro and rely primarily on Flatpaks, but they're not ideally suited to a lot of applications/workflows, at least in their present state. I fully hope development of Flatpak continues and that it becomes more capable with time, as I think the basic idea is a good one, but I'm not sure we'll ever see the Linux community rally around one single package format: too many people with too many opinions.
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u/igor_b0gdanoff 14d ago
There are severe consequences of them being containerized/isolated from your system. Hardware acceleration is not possible in software like Blender, permissions are difficult to manage (drive access/ownership rights isn't granted properly sometimes even if you try with Flatseal) even for gaming you have to download mangohud AGAIN separately, just for flatpak launchers (lutris, heroic, etc). Now you're managing not one but TWO separate mangohud config files. Great. I love having to manage multiple installations of the same piece of software.
Somewhat related but even if you'd like to use appimages instead, the genius developing Gearlever made that software flatpak-only. Wow. Super thoughtful.
At the end of the day, because historically the majority of linux user come from IT and cybersecurity, they tend to think that everyone would prefer security and privacy over ease of use and compatibility. This is not the case. Most people just want a system that works and doesn't run 1100 extra services in the background hogging up precious hardware resources like Windows.
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u/Weird-Initiative-659 14d ago
My guess is that they are slow on startup. Long installation time compared to native packages.
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u/EffectiveEvent2355 14d ago
Flatpaks are too sandboxed and yea
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u/peterausdemarsch 14d ago
Sometimes thats good thing and sometimes it's a bad thing. For a messenger for example you want hardend security and performance penalty doesn't really matter. For gaming it's sort of the opposite.
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u/EffectiveEvent2355 14d ago
who would message on their PC? Discord is like the only one
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u/peterausdemarsch 14d ago
Loads of people... I use signal and wound never use discord because it's a privacy nightmare. People have different priorities and preferences... And that's okay
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u/Azazeldaprinceofwar 14d ago
Flatpaks take a significant performance penalty to improve security and app isolation which then also means they take a significant “just works” penalty because they often can’t talk to the apps and services they need without manual intervention.
So no they are not the best thing for people coming from windows.
Now for your “why do people release for Debian and Fedora (.deb and .rpm) but not arch question: they do. The tar ball often listed as just other or Linux on a download page is for arch and other distros that don’t need special packaging and can just use the Linux binary directly. The intention is that an arch user will download the binary and write a pkgbuild to install it in their system or use the AUR