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Flatpak is not perfect, but it's getting better
(thelibre.news)
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this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2025
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Flatpak is quite fucking far from perfect, and will always remain so due to its flawed design and UX approach.
Pretty sure the culprit here is Fedora’s packaging which adds an opaque systemd timer to run auto-updates, but the thread immediately next to this one on my homepage just happened to be a nice case-study in Flatpak fuckery: https://lemmy.world/post/30654407
Of course, the proposed changes in the article do nothing to fix this sorta problem, which happens to be the variety that end users actually care about. Flatpak is an epic noob trap since it pretends to be a plug-n-play beginner friendly tool, but causes all sorts of subtle headaches that newcomers inevitably don’t have diagnostic experience to address.
The problem of there being a separate runtime for each video driver version was explicitly discussed in the article:
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.
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 💀
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?
That solution sounds like a no brainer. I assume it's easier said than done (and maintained) ?
Flatpak doesn't have a UI? It is a packaging format.
From https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/introduction.html#terminology
You might be thinking of AppImages, which are more of a pure file format.
Are you talking about theming?
I’m talking about the executable binary
flatpak, which is the interface used to execute and manage applications distributed in the Flatpak bundle format.https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/flatpak-command-reference.html#flatpak