this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
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How does it stack up against traditional package management and others like AUR and Nix?

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[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 0 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

I'm a bit "eh" on flatpak. The only benefit I see is that it's sometimes more up-to-date than what I can get from an LTS package repository. As a heavy CLI user they force me to find and click icons which is irritating (yeah - I know about flatpak run something.I.always.forget but that's even worse somehow).

I've hit occasional issues with applications being too locked-down. Like with Darktable only being able to see things in $HOME/Pictures. But I keep my photography work in a different location so it can't see it. I had to jump through some odd hoops to fix that. Not a problem of flatpak itself per se but something you can expect when dealing with package makers.

I fall back on flatpak if the version available through the standard package manager is too out-of-date for my liking. Other than that I can't be bothered.

EDIT: Okay - for people who think they're being "helpful" by telling me that "aliases are a thing" just stop. I'm not going to workaround a broken system. I'm going to use another one that isn't broken (or less broken).

[–] Pantherina@feddit.de 0 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Try this aliasing script I made

No idea if it still works lol, but should tbh. I think its even pretty well done.

  1. Lists your installed flatpak apps
  2. Searches for already added aliases
  3. Convert the appname to be the last part, remove - _ and make uppercase letters lowercase
  4. Alias to bash, fish, zsh

Only thing missing is handling duplicate apps I think.

[–] zephr_c@lemm.ee 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

If you're going to use flatpak from the command line you're definitely going to need to start aliasing those flatpak run commands. It's still annoying, but at least that way it's only annoying once.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

No. I'll use snaps before I start maintaining a bunch of aliases that I shouldn't have to. It's a flaw in flatpak.

[–] Pantherina@feddit.de 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

No snaps are insecure on other distros that Ubuntu, as they are only isolated using apparmor. Also they are nonfree by design, just no.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

They're not insecure. No more so than when I install a package via apt. No more so than when I download some code and compile it. This is propaganda.

[–] Pantherina@feddit.de 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

They are less secure than flatpaks and there was malware on that store

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You think the unverified flatpaks which choose their own permissions are "safe"?

[–] Pantherina@feddit.de 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You have the option to add the verified subset only, and you can always check permissions before starting an installed app, and it will not start before.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] Pantherina@feddit.de 0 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah with Snaps you also have unofficial packages, no apparmor at all and a mix of foss and nonfoss apps.

But with flatpak these things are accessible and Flatseal is very commonly used.

"Already perfect" vs. "Has the foundation to fix it easily" distros could easily allow to add the subset or improve the permission system.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Do... Do you think I'm claiming snaps are better or something? I'm saying they're much easier to use and I don't give a shit about walled-garden BS. I don't want my laptop to be like my phone. I want to install an application and I want it to work. Flatpaks are fine - they just made a really stupid decision about how to run them from the CLI which is 90% of the time where I launch programs from.

[–] Pantherina@feddit.de 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Do you have a better approach for running from CLI? Apps need exact names I guess, and the system is exact.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The way we've done it for like 30 years seems to work.

[–] Pantherina@feddit.de 0 points 8 months ago

How would you prevent package duplicates when using flatpak and native?

alias "flatpak run org.app.name"=*f-name"