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Is there a downside to Flatpak? (lemmy.world)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

3 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Basically title.

I’m wondering if a package manager like flatpak comes with any drawback or negatives. Since it just works on basically any distro. Why isn’t this just the default? It seems very convenient.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Yes, I love it and don't get me wrong but there are many downsides and they all result from poor planning and/or bad decisions around how flatpak was built. Here are a few:

Poor integration with the system: sometimes works against you and completely bypasses your system instead of integrating with it / using its features better. To me it seems more like the higher levels are missing pieces to facilitate communication between applications (be it protocols, code or documentation) and sometimes it is as simple as configuration;
Overhead, you'll obviously end up with a bunch of copies of the same libraries and whatnot for different applications;
No reasonable way to use it / install applications offline. This can become a serious pain point if you're required to work in air gapped systems or you simply want to level of conservation for the future - it doesn't seem reasonable at all to have to depend on some repository system that might gone at some point. Note that they don't provide effective ways to mirror the entire repository / host it locally nor to download some kind of installable package for what you're looking for;
A community that is usually more interested in beating around the bush than actually fixing what's wrong. Eg. a password manager (KeePassXC) and a browser (Firefox/Ungoogled) both installed via flatpak can’t communicate with each other because developers seem to be more interested in pointing fingers on GitHub than fixing the issue.

Flatpak acts as a restrictive sandbox experience that is mostly about "let's block things and we don't care about anything else". I don't think it's reasonable to have situations like applications that aren't picking the system theme / font without the user doing a bunch of links or installing more copies of whatever you already have. Flatpak in general was a good ideia, but the system integration execution is a shame.

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

The double-edged sword of isolation.

On the one hand, poor communication between apps and waste of storage.

On the other, relative safety from malicious applications, or from otherwise-safe applications built on top of a thousand libraries none of which have been audited by the dev.

I don't know how it's going to go down, but I suspect something will come along to address these issues and snatch the market away from Flatpak.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

but I suspect something will come along to address these issues and snatch the market away from Flatpak.

I believe it could only be fixed by a team from GNOME or KDE, they're the one in a position to develop something like Flatpak but deeply integrated with the system instead of trying to get around it.

For what's worth Apple did a very good job when it came to the isolation and containerization of desktop applications, but again only possible because they control both sides.

Apple enforces a LOT of isolaton, they call it sandboxed apps and it is all based on capabilities, you may enjoy reading this. Applications get their isolated space at ~/Library/Containers and are not allowed to just write to any file system path they want.

A sandboxed app may even think it is writing into a system folder for preference storage for example - but the system rewrites the path so that it ends up in the Container folder instead. For example under macOS apps typically write their data to ~/Library/Application Support. A sandboxed app cannot do that - and the data is instead written beneath the ~/Library/Containers/app-id path for that app.

And here's how good Apple is, any application, including 3rd party tools running inside Terminal will be restricted:

I bet most people weren't expecting that a simple ls would trigger the sandbox restrictions applied to the Terminal application. The best part is that instead of doing what Flatpak does (just blocking things and leaving the user unable to to anything) the system will prompt you for a decision.

I believe this was the best way to go about things but it would require to get a DE team to make it in a cohesive and deeply integrated with the system. Canonical could do it... but we all know how Canonical is.