I’ve been involved with Linux for a long time, and Flatpak almost seems too good to be true:
Just install any app on any distro, isolated from the base system and with granular rights management. I’ve just set up my first flatpak-centric system and didn’t notice any issues with it at all, apart from a 1-second waiting time before an app is launched.
What’s your long-term experience?
Notice any annoying bugs or instabilities? Do apps crash a lot? Disappear from Flathub or are unmaintained? Do you often have issues with apps that don’t integrate well with your native system? Are important apps missing?
Absolutely fucking awful. I’ve had issues with every one I’ve used.
Been trying to move to silverblue/ublue/sericia.
Firefox comes out of the box as both a system package and a flatpak. The flatpak does WebGL stuff fine, but video is broken; the system package does video, but webgl is broken.
Boxes was the first app I had needed to open a file with, and every time I need to, I have to restart some systemd portal service first. And there’s no guest to host audio.
I always had this problem with Inkscape on standard fedora where the icons on the layers menu would be corrupted. Wasn’t so on my first use of it with flatpak. Great! But subsequent runs the issue returned.
Discord worked fine for a few weeks. Then it started crashing on launch. A bit of googling and installing an old MESA platform flatpak had the problem resolved… for a day.
The only flatpak that has worked without a hitch has been Spotify.
Everything is so different, I have no idea how to debug this shit. And even then, I’m not 15 with unlimited time and zero dollars any more. I don’t have the time to spend 5 hours working out why my image editors icons are wrong.
Having a one-stop distribution-agnostic repository where it’s easy to install software devops-style is a win. (Setting up custom repos, or installing the latest rpm every week (looking at you discord) can be a pain). Buuut I’m not convinced.