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Flatpak’s Future May Leave Non-systemd Distros Behind
(linuxiac.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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Why are people using flatpak again?
They're somewhat sandboxed, likely to be up to date, and it behaves similarly across different machines. It's nice for GUI programs that don't need access to the wider system, and it won't mess with anything else that I already have installed. I guess it would have similar pros and cons as containerization with Podman/Docker?
I get the vast majority of my GUI programs from Flathub. I didn't know there was a controversy with it, other than just wanting a different way of doing things.
Yea I love Flatpak. No dependency hell, works great in Discover, never need to pipe curl into bash for some huge installer script, it gives a little bit of safety with sandboxing, and you can even install/update without the admin password
I almost always favor it except for something more core to the system (web browser, Steam... that's about it lol)
Because it just works, and updates faster than apt.
Everything updates faster than apt, and AppImages just work if that's the standard we're going with.
I don't hate AppImages, but they're not as convenient as Flatpak
How? I dont think its possible to be more convenient than an AppImage.
AppImages don't go in Discover with all my other programs. They don't auto update, no review system, no way to cleanup the files they created when uninstalling, I have to manually add shortcuts to my app launcher. Also Flatseal is pretty cool.
I've tried Gear Lever, but in my experience it hasn't ever succeeded in updating an AppImage for me. And it's kind of awkward giving it an AppImage file so it can move the file, instead of the download and the installation being the same single action.
One thing a lot of people don't know about Flatpak is that you can get .flatpakref files like Kdenlive uses for their daily builds. Very cool!
https://cdn.kde.org/flatpak/kdenlive-nightly/org.kde.kdenlive.flatpakref
https://kdenlive.org/download/
How do you know an update has been released? How do you upgrade it?
Gear Lever?
That's interesting, so it requires flatpak to install, but why would you when you already use flatpak?
To use App Images! :D
For when the devs provide app image but not flatpak or are app images somehow better?
That or if you're running an immutable distro like Bazzite and there's an app image available because it's easier than setting up OS-tree layering etc.
Or you just want an easy way to update app images lol
Because at least with flatpak I don’t end up with app files littering my system and personal folders.
macOS’s application format used to be the best. It’s kind of a mess now with half of apps following xdg, some writing to the app folder, some application support and some iCloud Drive.
But it used to be good.
A clean home directory is the best selling point for me with flatpaks
I have an atomic distro, and it lets me install apps without having to reboot or spin up distrobox.