I usually try to stay out of the whole snap vs flatpak discussion. Although I am just really confused as to why flatpak just does not seem to care about usability. You’re trying to create a universal packaging format I would think the point of it is that a user can just install an app and after reviewing permissions it should “just work”.
There are so many issues that yes, have simple solutions, but why are these issues here in the first place.
These are the issues that I have encountered that annoy me:
- Themes, cursors being inconsistent (needs to be fixed manually with flatpak --user override
- IDE’s are unusable without extensions
At least snap provides an option --classic to make the app work. Please explain to me why flatpak just evidently refuses to take this same approach.
It is really quite simple.
Flatpaks (and Snaps, and Appimages and Docker containers for that matter) are essentially designed for app developers who grew tired of distro maintainers demands to fix certain things about their build systems and their applications that broke when their apps were used on distros other than the exact distro and version the developer was using. They are designed to take a “kill the messenger” approach to the problem and now people are wondering why the work that the distro maintainers did before doesn’t get done any more.
Themes, cursors being inconsistent (needs to be fixed manually with flatpak --user override
I haven’t had this issue in about 6 months.
IDE’s are unusable without extensions
Yeah, IDE integration is kinda bad. Use containers instead.
Next problem please?
Some apps automatically pick up your theme some don’t. For these I give the specific app access to my theme folder with a :ro at the end of the path.
IDEs should work ootb. If some extension doesn’t work, maybe it’s because of poor support for Flatpak. 9/10 times you’ll find the issue is that app is calling the traditional /usr/bin path etc. when Flatpak installations use different paths.
That theme situation is a bit odd, there should be better documentation about that.
You can help improve the desktop integration documentation at their GitHub repo.
It’s Linux, dude. If everything worked then everyone would use it. Can’t have that .
because they dont exist to make it esier for users.
The very concept of them is that they bring along basically everything but the kernel - all their library dependencies, all their config, everything. So they’re ‘reliable’ and ‘easy to start’, but also bloated, slow to start, resource hungry, don’t depend on system libraries that can be updated independently, and as you see, look like crap. Working as intended, nothing to see here.
