According to Door Knocker, almost half of the portals are unavailable on Ubuntu 16.04, compared to only one unavailable on Fedora 39 with GNOME, which means Flatpaks running here may have more limited capabilities than usual.
Ok, so it’s time for me to do some research on Flatpaks now. I’m an old schooler from Redhat days and haven’t kept up with the new stuff all that much.
As well as running on all distros, it also provides other benefits:
- You can run modern software on old/stable distros
- Dependencies being (mostly) included in the package means that different applications can more easily have different versions of dependencies
- Finicky packages are more stable for that same reason
- Distro maintainers don't need to package as many applications (https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/thread/46ZZ6GZ2W3G4OJYX3BIWTAW75H37TVW6/), and application maintainers don't need to worry about multiple distros and versions of dependencies
However, some applications don't work as well because of the sandbox, but I think this will change with the rising popularity of Flatpak, as more developers will use portals instead of direct access. Also, there are some bugs and missing features, like how heavy use of the org.freedesktop.Flatpak portal for dbus causes a memory leak (https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-dbus-proxy/issues/51), but it's overall pretty good. Most applications I use are Flatpaks.
Mint integrates flatpak seemlessly into its graphic package management and update tools.
Another big advantage of Flatpaks is the portability, since they live in your home.
I've had to reinstall distros and swap to different ones a decent amount. I simply backup and restore my home dir, and all my flatpaks get carried over, appear in my app launchers, and usually have their app data saved so I don't even have to relogin/reconfigure to stuff. It's as if I had just closed and opened it again.
It's crazy this works even when completely swapping distros.
