this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024

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Flatpak is only for graphical apps - Flatpak's biggest flaw? (iusearchlinux.fyi)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

40 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I love Flatpaks, the programs are nicely separated so they don't interfere with each other. They also don't have flaws like Snap's low performance or Nix's complexity.

But being limited to only graphical apps seems like a real drawback. If one wants to use Flatpaks as their primary package manager there have to be some awkward workarounds for cli programs.

E.g., the prime Flatpak experiene is supposed to be on immutable distros like Silverblue. But to install regular cli programs you are expected to spin up a distrobox (or toolbox) and install those programs there.

Having one arch distrobox where I get my cli programs from will not work, as the package entropy over time will get me the very dependency issues that Flatpak wants to solve.

So what is the solution here? Have multiple distroboxes and install packages in those in alternation and hope the boxes don't break? Use Nix alongside Flatpak? Use Snaps?

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Flatpak can do CLI apps it's just mildly unwieldy because of the whole flatpak run ....

If you want reproducible dev environments, yeah you're pushed to container solutions be it distrobox, Podman or Docker. Or something like nix as a user.

If you install a Debian distrobox it'll be as reliable as Debian itself is. It's only an issue when you're after 100% reproducible systems, which Docker can help somewhat with, or again, nix. Or NixOS if you really want it all system-wide.

[–] atzanteol 13 points 10 months ago (4 children)

flatpak run org.gimp.Gimp image.png vs. gimp image.png or even xdg-open image.png. "Mildly unwieldy" I suppose but a massive pain in the ass in practice. I can't believe they thought that it was a good idea to require all that and provide no way to create a script in /usr/local/bin or even .local/bin.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

echo 'alias gimp="flatpak run org.gimp.Gimp"' >> ~/.bash_profile

[–] atzanteol 32 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Oh my God I never thought of that! /s

What a pain in the ass to require me to maintain a set of aliases for everything I install. Great user experience.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I think it was meant for graphical stuff. You can do terminal inside a flatpak but I don't think that was the intended usecase.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

And the other 125 flatpaks I have?

[+] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] atzanteol 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That's a pain in the ass. Why not automate it with the install? They already create .desktop files FFS.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago (2 children)

It is actually. Add /var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin to PATH.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

This is the answer! Next question is why doesn't the flatpack install do this for you?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Flatpak should not be adding directories to $PATH. That is for the distribution or user to do

[–] atzanteol 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Really? That's a thing? I don't mind a one-time PATH modification and was excited to see this but... I don't see that path on my system. Maybe it's optional and none of my applications are using it?

I also don't see any mention of that in the flatpak.org setup steps. And almost nobody replying here even knows about it. And all of the examples of running a flatpak from the CLI on flatpak.org and flathub.org use the flatpak run org.gimp.Gimp version.

So it seems like it's a feature, but it's poorly documented, poorly advertised, and not used... :-(

Edit: So I did find that directory on another system of mine. No idea why it's there on one and not the other. Maybe a version thing. And gimp is symlinked as "org.gimp.Gimp". What a failure... 🤦

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Flatpak should export mimetypes so xdg-open should work if there isn't another handler registered

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You mean it already does. (“should” can be vague)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I believe so. (Depending on how your OS packages flatpak)