Linux

The biggest downside is that it's only for distributing applications with a graphical user interface. Command line utilities still need another method of distribution.

What could be wrong with random foreign executables in your system?

As a basic end-user I have not been too happy with my experience with flatpaks. I do appreciate that I can easily setup and start using it regardless of what distro I'm using. But based on standard usage using whatever default gui "app store" frontends that usually come with distros, it tends to be significantly slower than apt, for instance, and there seems to be connection problems to the repos pretty often as well.

Take a look at this site that goes into the details of the shortcomings of Flatpak, its from 2020 but I'm sure some of this is relevant still

As everything in life, yes, there is downside. Major downside is that it can occupy more space in your hd or ssd.

However I think the downsides are not that bad to justify all the hatred some guys have.

Flatpak positive sides are way more relevant then the downsides

GPU drivers. It uses the Ubuntu 22.04 (LTS) userspace side of drivers. Could be incompatible with your kernel. Had all sorts of graphical weirdness with my AMD GPU with flatpak Steam.

The main reason I don't use them is because when I move my nixos config to a new machine as far as I know you cant get them to auto install. I have to remember which ones I had installed and redo them manually.

Which is why if for some odd reason I don't want to just install from the nix pkgs repo. I use app images. I can keep them in a directory which I can just copy over to the new machine with my nixos config files.

Yes, the confusion that results when things don't work because of isolation.

I feel like this should be required reading for a lot of Linux users. That article is a couple years old now, but I think is even more true now than it was when it was written. Having a middleman (package maintainer) between the user and the software developer is a tremendous benefit. Maintainers enforce quality, and if you bypass them, you're going to end up with Linux as the Google Play Store (doubly so if you try and fool yourself into thinking it won't happen because "Linux is different")

What I find most annoying is the extra drive space required. It makes backing up and restoring my computer so much more annoying. The upside of this is that I've ended up learning how to install from source so I can avoid them when a deb package is not available!

If you have an unusual setup, it can be annoying trying to give programs permissions and sometimes it just outright doesn't work. For example, I mainly game on a laptop which has a pretty small hard drive, so I tend to put most of my games on an external hard drive. Flatpak really doesn't play well with that.

Flatpak usually ships very outdated drivers.

I've been in the support channel for yuzu linux, and you would not believe all the issues people have with games freezing, etc that are instantly fixed by using the appimage instead of the flatpak.

Also flatpaks are non-xdg compliant, since it creates the useless ~/.var directory. And they have said over and over that they won't fix that. So fuck them.

Not to mention all the issues people have with their theming and integration into the system.

Appimages are just simpler and better, the other day I was thinking how many issues would be fixed if Steam shipped as an appimage.

• It would allow for shipping a patch glibc with EAC
• It would allow for moving all the nonsense that steam puts in the home user dir, since appimages support a portable home.
• It would allow for shipping the 32bit libraries instead of having to install them system wide.

And depending on how you go about, appimages will even take less disk space than flatpaks or native packages even though you don't get shared libraries with those, because they are compressed which reduces their size significantly.

Like for example the LibreWolf appimage is 110MiB while a the native package for librewolf 300MiB. Same with LibreOffice, the appimage is 300MiB while the native package is 600 MiB.

It also makes it easier to downgrade if you run into an issue, like I had to had an older appimage of ferdium because the latest version is affected by an electron bug that broke its zoom functionality.

I use flatpak for all GUI apps I use.

No downside, only flatpak