never tried flatpak, snaps were so bad as to never consider non-native installs or just use docker instances when I need to run something weird. so dunno.
whats the use case for a flatpak exactly? maybe im not the target audience???
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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What’s a flatpak? Is that like a worse NixOS package? I prefer NixOS, BTW.
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I've heard Flatpaks aren't great at CLI tools, is that true ?
As a Nix user, I'm glad Flatpaks exist for other people, but I only ever use them when a package is not available from Nix directly. Seeing as Nix is literally the biggest package manager out there, it's a pretty rare occurrence.
I posted this in another thread, but reposting here because a lot of people, including myself up until very recently, were under that impression:
I've packaged a CLI that I made as a flatpak. It works just fine. Nothing weird was required to make it work.
The only thing is that if you want to use a CLI flatpak, you probably want to set an alias in your shell to make running it easier.
I'm not sure why more CLIs aren't offered as flatpaks. Maybe because static linking them is so easy? I know people focus on flatpak sandboxing as a primary benefit, but I can't help but think that if static linking was easier for bigger applications, it wouldn't be needed as much.
Yes it is true. Flatpak is for gui apps only, at least as far as I know.
They always seem to have some critical limitation. Handbrake is too slow via flatpak to work. Flatpak Zoom had no camera access. Flatpak-only Zen browser can't use passkeys. Zen browser asks to be my default browser every time I open it, even though it is and I always say yes; is this a flatpak limitation? I don't know, and I'd prefer not to have to figure it out just for some theoretical benefits and more overhead.
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I like the sandboxing of Flatpak, but I prefer AppImage as I don't like having the Flatpak runtime requirement.
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Honestly, I am a little scarred from snap.
Otherwise I'm agnostic on flatpaks - I've used a couple and they're ok? They just remind me of old windows games that dump all their libraries in a folder with them.
On a modern system the extra space and loss of optimisation is ok, but on older hardware or when you're really trying to push your system to run something it technically shouldn't, I can see it being an issue.