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What has been your experience with Flatpak?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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Aside from philosophical issues my experience with Flatpak has been excellent. There's some theming steps you need to do to make them feel like regular apps, which I feel is clunky design. No Flatpak-induced instability from what I can tell. Setting up directory permissions is sometimes slightly annoying but Flatseal makes it trivial, and most Flatpak permissions are set up properly out of the box these days.
I haven't noticed any start-time delays when launching Flatpaks as opposed to regular apps - I don't know if they've fixed that or if my system is just too powerful. The only app that I've personally noticed is weird is VSCodium, which has trouble escalating to admin permissions when you're trying to edit privileged files. I still use the regular version for that reason.
I wasn't able to get the
gsettingsmethod to work (I'm on Wayland KDE), and that article doesn't say anything about theming QT Flatpaks. Also, after "installing" my GTK theme as a flatpak via the method described, it still wasn't available to my GTK Flatpaks via theGTK_THEMEmethod. The steps in the itsfoss.com article do work, though there's been a lot of squabbles about the "proper" way to expose themes to Flatpaks. Regardless, this all goes back to my point that theming Flatpak is clunky and should be much smoother.GTK_THEME is a development env var, it’s not expected to work in many cases. For example GtkSettings:gtk-theme won’t even contain it so apps can be confused.
The post details exactly how it works but yes it’s only about GTK.
Right, I understand it's not supposed to be used in "proper" usage, but it does work for all my GTK apps and the
gsettingsmethod does not work for me. Unless I'm supposed to store it somewhere else because I'm on KDE.You must not have xdg-desktop-portal-gtk.
I think one recent release was also bugged but it’s fixed if up to date.
I do have
xdg-desktop-portal-gtkon Debian Stable, which is currently at 1.14.1-1. I'll look around to see if there's more documentation on this method, because I would prefer to not use the debug variables if possible.Edit: I launched with GTK_DEBUG=interactive and I can see the theme inside the Flatpak gets set to
Adwaita-emptyinstead of my actual theme, which does get properly returned viagsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-themeThe way to test what GTK actually gets is this command:
gdbus call -e -d org.freedesktop.portal.Desktop -o /org/freedesktop/portal/desktop -m org.freedesktop.portal.Settings.Read org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-themeThat gets my normal GTK theme properly. I found a little more discussion on this here. Nothing very actionable but I did also confirm that my
xdg-desktop-portal-gtkis running. It seems like this is supposed to be working, but I have a mostly stock Debian 12.1 KDE install and something seems to be wrong somewhere in the chain. I've also tried multiple GTK Flatpaks with the same results.Edit: Also, I have both my themes folder exposed and the theme installed as a Flatpak via the linked script.
OPs case sounds like it's distro-specific, rather than Flatpak specific. Flatpaks don't do the Snap thing that bloats start time