I’ve been involved with Linux for a long time, and Flatpak almost seems too good to be true:
Just install any app on any distro, isolated from the base system and with granular rights management. I’ve just set up my first flatpak-centric system and didn’t notice any issues with it at all, apart from a 1-second waiting time before an app is launched.
What’s your long-term experience?
Notice any annoying bugs or instabilities? Do apps crash a lot? Disappear from Flathub or are unmaintained? Do you often have issues with apps that don’t integrate well with your native system? Are important apps missing?
ive had supprisingly little issues with flatpaks.
i have been running silverblue for about half a year now, and rely heavily on them.
i can remember 3 distinct issues:
vs code commandlines start in the sandbox, which needs a workarround (rather understandable)
either the fedora, or the flathub build of firefox didnt come with some video codec, OpenH264 i think. switching to the other build fixed it (imo more a licensing issue with the codec than a flatpak problem)
on rare occasions (about once every 3 month)
steam behaves weirdly, and refuses to start until i update the flatpak.
other than that, it has been a smoth ride.
Just in case anyone in this thread also has problems with video playback on flathub Firefox, I just solved that by installing the ffmpeg-full flatpak.
No idea why a dependency that is needed to play video without jitter isn’t installed automatically.