I know snap is fairly unpopular in the Linux community, and I’ve seen mixed responses regarding Flatpak. I wanted to know, what’s the general opinion of people in this community regarding this 2 package managers?

  • methodicalaspect
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    21 year ago

    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.

    • Semperverus
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      41 year ago

      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.

    • Ɀeus
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      1 year ago

      i did look into solving this, but it was a while ago and i’ve forgotten. it’s something like gnome stores the theme in ~/.gtkrc, whereas plasma stores it in ~/.config/gtk/settingsrc; which flatpak doesn’t check. it also requires screwing with flatseal, didn’t work with gtk4, and was only minor compared to my other issues. it might work better if i used a flatpak theme, but there’s only about 10 available

      as for performance, it’s fine once the app starts, but startup takes ages. also, some flatpaks don’t seem to accept “open with” - bottles, for example, even though q4wine does