I love Flatpaks, the programs are nicely separated so they don't interfere with each other. They also don't have flaws like Snap's low performance or Nix's complexity.

But being limited to only graphical apps seems like a real drawback. If one wants to use Flatpaks as their primary package manager there have to be some awkward workarounds for cli programs.

E.g., the prime Flatpak experiene is supposed to be on immutable distros like Silverblue. But to install regular cli programs you are expected to spin up a distrobox (or toolbox) and install those programs there.

Having one arch distrobox where I get my cli programs from will not work, as the package entropy over time will get me the very dependency issues that Flatpak wants to solve.

So what is the solution here? Have multiple distroboxes and install packages in those in alternation and hope the boxes don't break? Use Nix alongside Flatpak? Use Snaps?

  • j0rge@lemmy.ml
    ·
    5 months ago

    the package entropy over time will get me the very dependency issues that Flatpak wants to solve.

    You can declare your distroboxes so that they get created regularly from scratch instead of upgrading in place: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/usage/distrobox-assemble.md

    That way the entropy never hits you. Then use the Prompt terminal https://gitlab.gnome.org/chergert/prompt to make it just part of your terminal ootb.

  • ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org
    ·
    5 months ago

    Flatpaks are disk and memory hogs, and they start slowly. That's because they're like little selt-contained full-fledged operating systems.

    Flatpaks, like snaps, applimages, dockers, Electron apps, React apps or Flutter apps are the lazy 21st century developer's way of achieving cross-compatibility without any effort.

  • sweet@lemmy.ml
    ·
    5 months ago

    I wrote a nice little CLI tool that lets you browse the flatpak store in the terminal and has an option to link all your flatpaks to their short names. Its really just a wrapper bash script that runs flatpak, but I like it because it goes from com.Blender.Blender to just "blender" and it works on the command line.

  • ViciousTurducken@lemmy.one
    ·
    5 months ago

    VPN apps don't seem to work with it and Proton said their Drive app won't either. So for whatever reasons those might be.