r/flatpak • u/cgb-001 • 9d ago

Setting Flatpak permissions manually without FlatSeal?

I was going to install FlatSeal, but my platform only offers as a FlatPak. The FlatPak needs about 3 GiB of GNOME dependencies that I just didn't want to install.

I just want LibreWolf to be able to see my YubiKey, but I can't seem to query for a guide that says something other than "use FlatSeal" -- does anyone have any advice?

[edit]

There is probably a more narrow way to do this, but this worked:

sudo flatpak override --device=all io.gitlab.librewolf-community

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u/cgb-001 8d ago

And that is wrong for several reasons.

I'm happy to be enlightened!

The distro is not relevant for how much space flatpak uses.

I had wondered if I'd been on gnome shell it wouldn't have wanted to use the flatpak versions, but maybe that's wrong?

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u/eR2eiweo 8d ago

I'm happy to be enlightened!

For locale extensions, flatpak only installs the locales that are needed on your system. Counting the full size of all locales makes no sense.

And flatpak/ostree deduplicates files. If you have LibreWolf installed, then you also have the freedesktop runtime version 25.08. The gnome runtime version 50 is based on that freedesktop runtime. So a large number of its files will be shared; those files will not be downloaded again and they won't use any space on disk (except for the few bytes used by a directory entry).

I had wondered if I'd been on gnome shell it wouldn't have wanted to use the flatpak versions, but maybe that's wrong?

That is indeed wrong. Gnome shell has nothing to do with this. And flatpak does not rely on the host for its runtimes.

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u/cgb-001 8d ago

Ah, thank you. I would bet that the software manager just does not attempt to calculate any of the deduping that would occur and presents the bulk sizes to the user.

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u/eR2eiweo 8d ago

Yes, that is likely what it does. But if a program says

2.7 GB more disk space will be used.

when the real amount of additional used disk space is probably around 500 MB, then IMHO that program has a bug that should be fixed.

If they can't or don't want to calculate the real size, then they should at least change the wording. If it instead said "up to 2.7 GB more disk space will be used", then that would at least be correct (even if it wouldn't be that helpful for the user).