The original post: /r/linux by /u/No-Dot-6573 on 2024-12-23 13:21:01.

Don’t get me wrong, I do like the pros of Flatpak. Sandboxing, dependencies included, cross distro compability sounds just about right to face the problems of common installation methods, but in my personal experience the way those apps run are much more troublesome than even a build from source as the problems are runtime errors.

Currently I use Garuda Linux. This distro avoids Flatpaks, but I recently tried out Bazzite and in the matter of the first(!) installation I stumbled upon a problem that is related to Flatpak. (Blender, Optix denoise not working.) The first helpful answer to the problem found online: Don’t use flatpak. -> Issue solved.

There are more problems I had in the past like heroic launcher not launching unity games because the needed DLL was not found. Heroic somehow can start the app but is not allowed to load the DLL right beside the exe. Sometimes this error could be resolved using flatseal but sometimes (other distro) it wont. The open source version of vs code misses so much features. (I get the point of this one, as the missing features are propietary and privacy threatening) The last issue that comes to my mind is related to snap, but since it is rather similar to Flatpak (afaik) I write it down as well: You cant (or couldnt) use selenium with Firefox.

So my question is: Am I missing something?

I cant believe a distro developer is thinking like: Lets use flatpak. Our users wont be able to play games, create content or develop anything without a major headache, but our distro will be secure and no issues in the apps will be relevant to our distro. So that is nice.

For the ease of use and to spare people a lot of troubleshooting why isn’t it possible or included to ask for permissions on app start like it is common in Android? Maybe this would already solve a lot of errors.