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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

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What's your opinion on Snap/Flatpak, and why? (self.linux)

submitted 1 year ago by IUsedTo to c/[email protected]

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I know snap is fairly unpopular in the Linux community, and I've seen mixed responses regarding Flatpak. I wanted to know, what's the general opinion of people in this community regarding this 2 package managers?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The Flatpak theming issue is really annoying, yeah. There’s a rather limited pool of GTK themes to choose from in Flathub, but as long as you’re running one of those themes in your DE (assuming GNOME or other GTK-based), themes will inherit. Can’t speak to KDE as I haven’t used Plasma as primary.

Other than that, Flatpak has been great. I use it reasonably heavily on a laptop that’s slower than a Steam Deck (Ryzen 5 3500u, 8GB DDR4, 1TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus) and haven’t run into performance issues on multiple distros — EndeavourOS, Pop!_OS, LMDE, Fedora, an early version of Vanilla OS, and most recently Debian 12. On my desktop I don’t feel a performance difference between Flatpak and native.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

The steam deck uses KDE, so the most popular Linux desktop device is going to be showcasing what flatpak is(n't) capable of.

This is largely a problem thanks to the GNOME developers though, refusing to play nicely with anyone else and acting like their way is THE way.

[–] Zeus 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

i did look into solving this, but it was a while ago and i've forgotten. it's something like gnome stores the theme in ~/.gtkrc, whereas plasma stores it in ~/.config/gtk/settingsrc; which flatpak doesn't check. it also requires screwing with flatseal, didn't work with gtk4, and was only minor compared to my other issues. it might work better if i used a flatpak theme, but there's only about 10 available

as for performance, it's fine once the app starts, but startup takes ages. also, some flatpaks don't seem to accept "open with" - bottles, for example, even though q4wine does