I use Flatpak all the time. It works a lot better than native apps very often.
Also it’s a lot easier than fussing with PPAs or whatever. I’m on KDE Neon and wanted to run something through Wine. The Wine in the stock PPAs was an older version with a known bug that wouldn’t let me install the .NET Framework 4.8. I tried fetching the Wine PPA directly, but then I was getting issues about system packages not being compatible with newer versions of Wine.
The more I dug, the more issues popped up (typical Linux). So I gave up and decided to install Lutris and try it through there, since Lutris has a workaround for those Wine issues. The Lutris in the stock PPAs also was an old version with a known bug where it just… wouldn’t work. You’d click a button and nothing would happen because of an HTTP bug. Rather than fuss around with that, I gave up and installed the Lutris Flatpak.
30 seconds later, my program was installed and running. No nonsense in the command line, no fussing around with packages. Just open and go.
A majority of the programs I have are Flatpak now. I have Flatpak for Zoom to let me take work meetings from my Linux partition; I have Flatpak for Parsec to let me remote in to my work desktop from my Linux partition. Blender, Calibre, Chrome, Discord, Thunderbird, PrusaSlicer, Slack, Rider, VS Code… all Flatpak.
They all work great. I get prompt updates to stay on the bleeding edge. No more dependency hell. I now actively search for Flatpaks before I fall back to apt.
I use Flatpak all the time. It works a lot better than native apps very often.
Also it’s a lot easier than fussing with PPAs or whatever. I’m on KDE Neon and wanted to run something through Wine. The Wine in the stock PPAs was an older version with a known bug that wouldn’t let me install the .NET Framework 4.8. I tried fetching the Wine PPA directly, but then I was getting issues about system packages not being compatible with newer versions of Wine.
The more I dug, the more issues popped up (typical Linux). So I gave up and decided to install Lutris and try it through there, since Lutris has a workaround for those Wine issues. The Lutris in the stock PPAs also was an old version with a known bug where it just… wouldn’t work. You’d click a button and nothing would happen because of an HTTP bug. Rather than fuss around with that, I gave up and installed the Lutris Flatpak.
30 seconds later, my program was installed and running. No nonsense in the command line, no fussing around with packages. Just open and go.
A majority of the programs I have are Flatpak now. I have Flatpak for Zoom to let me take work meetings from my Linux partition; I have Flatpak for Parsec to let me remote in to my work desktop from my Linux partition. Blender, Calibre, Chrome, Discord, Thunderbird, PrusaSlicer, Slack, Rider, VS Code… all Flatpak.
They all work great. I get prompt updates to stay on the bleeding edge. No more dependency hell. I now actively search for Flatpaks before I fall back to apt.