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Is there a downside to Flatpak?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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Others have mentioned disk usage and desktop integration. There is some truth to them, but shared runtimes keeps disk uasge down (although worse than native apps). Desktop launchers now search
/var/lib/flatpak/exports/share/applicationsby default, but I'm still having issues with themes in one or two niche apps.Trust is the big one. The benefit of your distro's packages is that they are maintained by a limited number of maintainers. Flatpaks have a much, much larger number of maintainers, which is where sandboxing comes in. Flathub now marks apps with lax permissions as "potentially unsafe", which is a huge step in communicating this to the average user.
Most desktop apps can get away with having next to no access, as long as they support the appropriate XDG desktop portals.
Ultimately, your mileage will vary, as there are many classes of application which are ill-suited to being sandboxed. Program launchers, programming languages, IDEs, file managers are a few.