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Flatpak is not perfect, but it's getting better (thelibre.news)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 days ago (3 children)

The problem of there being a separate runtime for each video driver version was explicitly discussed in the article:

If you are part of the huge part of the population who happens to own a Nvidia GPU, it's a whole other can of worms. There are Flatpak runtimes that target specific Nvidia driver versions, but they must be matched with a compatible version installed on the host system, and it is not always a process as smooth and painless as one would hope.

An improvement idea that is floating around is to, basically, just take a step back and load the host drivers directly into the runtime, rather than shipping a specific version of the userspace drivers along with the application. Technically, it is possible: Valve's Linux runtime is pretty similar to Flatpak architecturally, and they solved this problem from its inception by using a library called libcapsule to load the natively installed host drivers into the Steam Runtime. This is the reason why it's significantly rarer that an old Steam game fails to launch on a new GPU, compared to the same scenario on Flatpak!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago

Ah - I totally missed the Nvidia-related bit! Thanks for flagging that.

That being said, based on the maintainers’ past stances, I’m pretty pessimistic on them actually implementing a fix like that. They’re very much against the general practice of poking holes in their sandbox security perimeter.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I really think if flatpaks were built upon nix, it would resolve these problems. It would however bring a new problem: people would have to learn forsaken nix 💀

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

It's not clear that it would, because the root problem is locking a package to a particular version of the nvidia drivers, which nix would not solve. Unless I am missing something?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

That solution sounds like a no brainer. I assume it's easier said than done (and maintained) ?