this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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pretty unpopular opinion i believe, but i loathe them. they feel like installing apps from the windows store, but worse. i use them on steam deck and my laptop, but they often fail to launch with no feedback[^1], won't accept drag&dropped files, store their dotfiles in weird places, take up much more disc space (and therefore take literally almost 10x as long to download), won't inherit the theme (i think because plasma stores the gtk theme in a non-standard place), etc. they feel like they've been designed to flout what os developers have built up over many decades and are just a struggle to use.
[^1]: on steam deck particularly (so i know it's not a configuration i've screwed up) no flatpaks will launch unless i launch them twice. even after that, there's a long delay (~1 minute) and then two instances launch. i know this sounds like i should just wait until the first one launches, but that doesn't work
The Flatpak theming issue is really annoying, yeah. There’s a rather limited pool of GTK themes to choose from in Flathub, but as long as you’re running one of those themes in your DE (assuming GNOME or other GTK-based), themes will inherit. Can’t speak to KDE as I haven’t used Plasma as primary.
Other than that, Flatpak has been great. I use it reasonably heavily on a laptop that’s slower than a Steam Deck (Ryzen 5 3500u, 8GB DDR4, 1TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus) and haven’t run into performance issues on multiple distros — EndeavourOS, Pop!_OS, LMDE, Fedora, an early version of Vanilla OS, and most recently Debian 12. On my desktop I don’t feel a performance difference between Flatpak and native.
The steam deck uses KDE, so the most popular Linux desktop device is going to be showcasing what flatpak is(n't) capable of.
This is largely a problem thanks to the GNOME developers though, refusing to play nicely with anyone else and acting like their way is THE way.