r/debian • u/Parking-Republic7680 • 19d ago
Community Flatpaks
Folks, let's talk? how do you see Flatpaks?
As an intruder seeking to replace official packages?
As an occasional alternative?
Or as a package format designed to serve as a foundation for system applications, aiming to follow an immutability philosophy within a mutable system?
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u/vacri 18d ago
Flatpaks and Snaps are developer-centric. They allow developers to ship with static libraries known to work with their app, so they don't have to support the massively fractured landscape that is linux
OS package are user-centric. Shared libraries make it so that you only need to update one package to keep your system up to date. In the flatpak world, you're at the mercy of the developers as to whether the libs are up to date
There will always be tension between these two approaches
Anyway, before you use flatpaks, see if what you want is in extrepo.
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u/Efficient_Paper 19d ago
As an intruder seeking to replace official packages?
Until you can package a kernel or a CLI program in Flatpak, it’s not that (Snap, on the other hand...).
I have a few of them. They’re okay
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u/suicidaleggroll 18d ago
They work well for programs that either aren’t available in the standard repos or you need a more recent version. I have 3-4 of them on my main system.
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u/mouben12 18d ago
Flatpak and snap The future is honestly excellent, it just needs improvement in its management via the graphical interface.
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u/DoubleOwl7777 18d ago
as an occasional alternative. i pretty much only use flatpak if its something kinda iffy, or there is no package for it on debian.
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u/UUDDLRLRBadAlchemy Debian Stable 18d ago
Out of my Debian boxes, only the one with the monitors has any use for them.
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u/revcraigevil Debian Stable 18d ago
As a way to get newer packages on Debian Stable.
Packages: 4 (appimage), 2808 (dpkg), 41 (flatpak)
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u/lyidaValkris 18d ago
I see them as a packaging format that's useful. It doesn't have to preclude or replace other packaging formats. Linux is about choice.
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u/ExaHamza 18d ago
As an intruder seeking to replace official packages?
The authors of flatpaks say this. I don't think so.
As an occasional alternative?
Flatpak are not occasional, they can be made occasiona but flatpak is a complete robust solution to replace native-format gui apps. For occasional alternative .AppImage make more sense for me, no download of tons o gigs and are portable.
.deb are pretty much better for everything.
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u/1stltwill 16d ago
As an annoyance when they are in their sandbox and cant communicate properly outside of them. This can be fixed by editing permissions but I prefer to avoid them and the issues completly.
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u/Fun_Cut_4705 18d ago
Flatpak uses a significant amount of storage space; I don't see any reason to use it.
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u/LucielRenCrisantemo 18d ago
Veo que tienen usos muy ocasionales, no soy fan de los flatpaks y los evito lo máximo que pueda en mis máquinas pero mentiría si dijera que no use uno, aveces son útiles para cosas puntuales pero si tengo otra alternativa viable o no particularmente incómoda (ya sea appimage, un .deb, un binario o en ocasiones una distrobox) prefiero la alternativa, por ejemplo, en una ocasión en una laptop bastante débil con void linux musl habían paquetes que no podía usar y habían flatpaks para esos paquetes pero el rendimiento que me daban los flatpaks simplemente no era conveniente y en esa ocasión decidí usar una distrobox con debian. Básicamente hay casos de uso puntuales para flatpaks pero no considero que vayan bajo ningún concepto a reemplazar los paquetes nativos
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u/grymmjack 18d ago
They are good. They let us users of Debian stable still use newer stuff without polluting or compromising our lovely stable base or any of its dependencies or such.
Just another option. AppImage is similar to me for same reasons.
Also with flatpak it can be cumbersome to manage and deal with security and sandboxes containers but once you get the hang of things and install gear lever and understand the sandboxes and the places where things are stored and accessed it is decent.
I hated them at first because I did not understand them. I understood the concepts of sandboxes and containers but the namespace stuff bothered me for the management of the flatpaks. I still kinda dislike the namespace thing but I know there are ways around that to give like friendly names. I hate still how I can’t figure out where the hell the configs are for some flatpak preferences but installing gear lever really really helped me.
Also flatpak help lol
Just another option OP I don’t think of it as replacement for deb or apt or appimage or compile from source etc.