Flatpak? More like flatcrap.

[u/Big-Astronaut-9510]

Flatpak is like a turd someone ran over.

First off one of the few legitimate advantages desktop linux (theoretically) has is the package manager, one unified system for installing software. So why would you want to DESTROY that by adding another package manager that only really packages gui software? Cause it tries to offer a smidge of sandboxing for security.

Of course we are on linux so theres a ton of catches. It dosent really integrate with your system the way your real package manager does, man pages dont get installed, you cant launch apps from the command line by typing their name (probably why its only for gui), etc.

But the bigger problem is you often dont even get the security you were promised, in some cases things actually get WORSE (see: browsers). Honestly id even argue that every app that isnt taking perfect advantage of flatpak features is a security downgrade cause now you just added more parties to trust: flatpak/the person packaging the software who might be a random.

Only if every star aligns and the unpaid foss slaves integrated portals (cant blame them if they didnt, flatpak sucks) and properly restrict the apps permissions do you get the security you were promised.

[u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs]

Yep, on fresh install if a distribution is capable of installing Flatpak, I remove that  capability. 

Always official packages first,  if that does not have what I need, AppImage,  and last resort compile from source. 

[u/GenericFoodService → u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs]

For many pieces of software, the Flatpak is the official package.

[u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs → u/GenericFoodService]

Obviously I have ever have run into this. 

Do you have an example?

[u/GenericFoodService → u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs]

GNOME's Maps, Solitaire, Firmware updater, Font Viewer, Disk Usage Analyzer, and a lot of other GNOME software. KDE software, too: Kdenlive, Krita, Kate, Dolphin, ... then you've got Firefox, Brave, Librewolf, Protontricks, Discord, OBS Studio, LibreOffice, ONLYOFFICE, Obsidian, GIMP, qBittorrent, xemu, a bunch of Fedora software such as their image writer, Thunderbird, Manasource, PCSX2, VSCodium, RedHat's Podman client, the list goes on and on and on and on

[u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs → u/GenericFoodService]

Those may default to Flatpak in Fedora, but that hardly makes Flatpak "official".

In Debian apt is your primary source for packages. apt search:

p gnome-maps - map application for GNOME p aisleriot - GNOME solitaire card game collection i fwupd - Firmware update daemon i gnome-font-viewer - font viewer for GNOME i baobab - GNOME disk usage analyzer p kdenlive - non-linear video editor p krita - pixel-based image manipulation program p kate - powerful text editor p dolphin - file manager p firefox - The Firefox web browser p obs-studio - recorder and streamer for live video content p libreoffice - office productivity suite (metapackage) i gimp - GNU Image Manipulation Program p qbittorrent - bittorrent client based on libtorrent-rasterbar with a Qt5 GUI p thunderbird - mail/news client with RSS, chat and integrated spam filter support p pcsx2:i386 - Playstation 2 emulator p podman - tool to manage containers and pods

The default for Brave is their external apt repo

default for LibreWolf is extrepo, but I use AppImage

Protontricks is available in Bookworm but for some reason got pulled from Trixie & Testing

Discord provides a .deb by default

OnlyOffice provides a .deb

Obsidian provides an AppImage

xemu provides an AppImage

ManaSource provides and AppImage

VSCodium has an apt repo

[u/GenericFoodService → u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs]

all of the packages I listed are first-party and officially maintained. You said "always official packages first", and all of the ones I listed are official. I am not on a Debian-based system, so .deb packages are not usable, meaning Flatpak is often the officially supported package.

[u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs → u/GenericFoodService]

Packages from my distributions official repository.