Flatpaks together with "immutable" distributions, Wayland and systemd are a heresy, a crime against the UNIX principles, a disgrace in the eyes of of SED and AWK. REPENT! Save your immortal core dumps and return to the one true /home !
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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Linux
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i like it. they are very convenient, work every time, and solves the distribution problem.
Former OS security here (I worked at an OS vendor who sold an OS or two and my job involved keeping it secure).
Fuck no.
Sorry if that makes you downvote, but it doesn't make them safer.
Would you mind elaborating?
A few reasons security people can have to hesitate on Flatpak:
- In comparison to sticking with strictly vetted repos from the big distros like Debian, RHEL, etc., using Flathub and other sources means normalizing installing software that isn't so strongly vetted. Flathub does at least have a review process but it's by necessity fairly lax.
- Bundling libraries with an application means you can still be vulnerable to an exploit in some library, even if your OS vendor has already rolled out the fix, because of using Flatpak software that still loads the vulnerable version. The freedesktop runtimes at least help limit the scope of this issue but don't eliminate it.
- The sandboxing isn't as secure as many users might expect, which can further encourage installing untrusted software.
By a typical home user's perspective this probably seems like nothing; in terms of security you're still usually better off with Flatpak than installing random AUR packages, adding random PPA repos, using AppImage programs, installing a bunch of Steam games, blindly building an unfamiliar project you cloned from github, or running bash scripts you find online. But in many contexts none of that is acceptable.
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It's a neat concept. The distro-agnostic aspect is definitely a plus for some people but I still prefer distro-specific installation methods. The only time I would seek out the Flatpak version of a particular software is when it's the only version available.
iit: nerds unable to comprehend that building a piece of software from source in not something every person can do.
EDIT: or doesn’t want to do
one of my least favorite things about arch and other rolling distros is that yay/pacman will try and recompile shit like electron/chromium from source every few days unless you give it very specific instructions not to - which is annoying as shit bc compiling the entirety of chrome from source takes hours even with decent hardware.
granted, i fucking hate google products too but if you’re doing any web dev it’s necessary sometimes.
idk im definitely willing to admit i might be the idiot here. managing your packages with pacman might just be routine to some people. to me arch is the epitome of classic bad UX in an open source project. it’s like they got too focused on being cmatrix-style terminal nerds and forgot to make their software efficiently useable outside of 5 very specific people’s workflows. it’s not even the terminal usage that is bad about arch. plenty of things are focused on that and… don’t do it shittily? idk…
edit: yes to all the arch fanboy’s points in response to me. i used to be super into arch and am aware of the fact that this isn’t explicit behavior but to act like it doesn’t happen in a typical arch user experience is disingenuous. i also disagree with the take that arch doesn’t endorse this outright with its design philosophy, bc it does. the comparison of the AUR to other, similar things like PPAs doesn’t land for me bc PPAs aren’t integrated into the ecosystem nearly as much as AUR is with arch. you can’t tell people to just grab the binaries or not use AUR whenever it’s convenient to blame the user, when arch explicitly endorses a philosophy amicable to self-compilation and also heavily uses the AUR even in their own arch-wiki tutorials for fairly basic use cases. arch wants to have its cake and eat it too and be a great DIY build it yourself toolkit while also catering to daily driver use and more generalist users. don’t get me wrong, it’s the best attempt at such a thing i’ve seen - but at a certain point you have to ask if the premise makes sense anymore. in the case of arch, it doesn’t and it causes several facets of the ecosystem to flounder from a user perspective. the arch community’s habit of shouting “skill issue” at people when they point out legitimate issues with the design philosophy bugs the fuck out of me. this whole OS is a camel.
All of the normal Arch packages are pre-built, so the only way you'd be compiling things that often is if you installed a large amount of things from the AUR. Make sure you get the bin versions instead of git versions.
The google-chrome and chromium packages are already a binaries so my guess is you need ungoogled-chromium-bin. You can also use the Chaotic AUR repo to get pre-built binaries of a lot of the most common AUR packages. But ideally you should avoid using the AUR when it's not necessary.
While using the AUR is common, it's a bit frustrating you are blaming Arch for your experience. If you only use pacman you would never compile anything, or have very many conflicts. It's like if you added 20 different PPAs on Ubuntu and then complained about the problems that arose from that.
I've been on Garuda for 4 years or so, not once has this happenoed to me
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I'm happy to use Flatpaks but the annoyances I've had are like when one application says to use you'll need to point to the binary of another application that it depends on but very understandably doesn't package together, figuring that out to me can be annoying so I'll switch to a regular installation and it all just works together no fuss, no flatseal, no thinking about it really. Also some applications where it's really nice to launch from the terminal especially with arguments or just like the current working directory and with Flatpaks instead of just right off the bat it's application name and hit enter, Flatpak hope you remember the whole package name
org.wilson.spalding.runner.knife.ApplicationName ...
Ya alias but got to remember to do that. So far anything I'd ever want to run from terminal, no Flatpak
I kinda like flatpaks being an option, not sure when they are the only option though.
Not a fan. There's often trouble, and some settings is hassle, and sometimes not even working.
i had a hard time getting used to them but now i love them in mint i can switch between the package version and flatpak version and usually the fp one is more updated
On the other hand each flatpak uses >1Gb of disk where deb packages rarely require more than 100Mb
See, I only use flatpaks sparingly for this reason, but in some cases they're indispensable when you don't want an application to access certain parts of your system. The sandboxing is what makes them useful, in my opinion. For everything else, there's the deb packages.
That's not really true. It lists all the flatpak dependencies in that disk use, but a lot of those are shared, so they don't actually use that much each if you install more than one, and the deb dependencies aren't included at all. Flatpaks really do use more space, especially if you only have a small number of them, but it's not as bad as that.
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I'm not a huge fan of Flatpaks, they're a lot harder to distribute offline versus something like AppImage. Seriously, you have to like create an offline repository, then create a bundle, and it's like 6 or 7 steps, it's honestly kind of ridiculous lol but other than that they seem fine, and they're easy enough to update (but so are apt packages)
I know some people may say "oh why do you need that", but Linux has taught me that my computer is my own, and I should be able to use it the way I want to. I shouldn't have to fight with my package manager to get it to do what I want. So I guess you could say, no I'm not really a fan of Flatpaks.
Personally, I didn't mind Snaps, but I'm getting kind of really fed up with especially for-profit companies etc so I don't like Snap that much now either.
Apt packages are nice, but the more of them you have installed, especially if you're using Ubuntu-based distros and have lots of PPAs, the more annoying upgrading your distro version can be because of all the dependencies and cross-dependencies.
AppImage tends to just work for me, as long as it's not compiled with a newer libc-bin version than the distro I'm currently using has, and I really enjoy that it's just one file I can copy and run pretty much anywhere.
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While I wouldn't want flakpak going deep into the OS I think the advantage of using them on the desktop is obvious. Developers can release to multiple dists from a single build and end users get updates and versions immediately rather than waiting for the dist to update its packages. Plus the ability to lock the software down with sandboxes.
The tradeoff is disk consumption but it's not really that big of a deal. Flatpaks are layered so apps can share dependencies. e.g. if the app is GNOME it can share the GNOME runtime with other apps and doesn't need to ship with its own.
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I like the idea of them because I don't like dealing with dependencies changing and breaking stuff and I don't really care too much about disk space in the context of non-game desktop apps, as I don't tend to install lots of them.
That being said I absolutely hate that permissions are all over the place and flatpak doesn't ship a GUI to manage them by default, nor do you get any indication as to what permissions a program has until you try some functionality (like filesystem or camera access) only to find out it doesn't work out of the box.
Cursed solution to a cursed problem 🤷
There was a few years where I pretty much only used Flatpaks because I was scared of the terminal. But now that I've learned how to use the terminal, it's so much more convenient because I can quickly update all my applications all in one place without having to open a separate app. Plus, some Flatpaks can fall really behind on software updates.
There might be a Linux userbase someday where no one other than developers actually knows how to use the terminal, because users can run everything they want without a command line, but maybe that's actually a good thing because it'll drive up how many people use a Linux distro.
With Windows and Mac, there's a shareholder incentive to enshittify. With Linux, if a distro goes bad and gets commercialized, there's always another distro people can move to, not to mention there's no financial incentive. The more people get on Linux, the less power these tech companies have. Personally, that and privacy are what drew me to Linux much more so than being able to tinker or fine-tune my experience.
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