I love what Flatpak is doing for Linux desktop. Let it grow!
It’s not the ideal solution, but it is approachable and understandable for technically averse users. I think it’s good to have, but I only used it for one package, and that was as a separate Steam install that included an old version of glibc that was used in a particular game’s (Squad) anti-cheat until it updated it.
It’s good for a stable platform, but each package needs it’s own set of everything, which can be good (like the Steam example above having its own version of glibc instead of using the shared version on my system), it’s a lot of bloat. I’m not using it unless I require it for some reason, but again it’s nice to have around.
Kill it.
But y tho?
What can flatpaks do that others -snap, appimage- can’t? At least they don’t have weird naming of program (com.sth.sth.fk)…
Different goals and different designs. Why are there so many Linux distro?
Snap is proprietary. Appimage does not include distribution and updates. It also doesn’t attempt sandboxing of any kind.
On the other hand, I find appimage very convenient to use.
Wastes RAM and disk space (compared to package-manager installed applications) by storing more libraries on disk and loading them into RAM rather than just using the libraries already installed on the distro. It’s probably better than Snap and Appimage though.
Is it even a problem for a desktop in 2024? Never had an issue with RAM or diskspace. And even for those that have, they can just not use flatpak until they upgrade, no reason to kill it.
I assume the “kill it” comment was a little tongue-in-cheek. On small SBCs, like a Pi, or old hardware, it could be a problem. I’ve seen people with flatpaks taking up 30GB of space, which is significant. I’m not sure how much RAM it wastes. I assume running 6 different applications that have loaded 6 different versions of Qt libraries would also use significantly more RAM than just loading the system’s shared Qt libraries once.
I don’t see a problem with Flatpak in this. It does what it’s supposed to do. You find not using it better? That’s great, that option is the default in all of the distributives.
Funny thing, it repacks a deb package.
See manifest.Is the a downside to repacking the deb package? They’re basically just zip files of the same binary you’d run on most other Linux distros.
I don’t say that. Rather it’s just a trivia.
Reposting the link from another comment on here, there is a PR to build the flatpak from source https://github.com/flathub/com.bitwarden.desktop/pull/222
Great to see progress! Why is it behind their official github releases though? Latest version is 2024.10.2 and not 2024.09.0. It is four releases, meaning more than a month, behind.
It looks like they are working on fixing that with this pull request.
Baby steps?
What does this desktop app do that the browser extension doesn’t? I tried the cli extension but it was rubbish…
The desktop app can be used as a bridge for biometrics in the browser extension, but other than that, it basically serves no unique purpose unless and until they add autofill for desktop applications.
I also would like to know what the desktop app is used for?
I’ve seen apps like xpipe that have direct Bitwarden integration if you want (way too high risk for me but I can see some people using it), but even then it integrates directly to the servers API. When I need an ssh password or something I copy and paste it from the browser extension. I’m curious if I’m missing some functionality by not using the app.
What does bitwarden have over keepass?
Sync that has never broken for me and works on a phone. My attempts at keypass with both google drive and syncthing invariably ended up with me needing to periodically do manual reconciliation. I’ve never had this problem with bitwarden. Also, bitwardens passkey hooks work on iOS. They appear unsupported by keepassium.
I cannot access my homelab from my work network, so I cannot sync via Nextcloud. Syncthing would be better, but they just stopped supporting Android sync, which I need. Proton Drive doesn’t sync files on Android. On top of that, I don’t want to deal with sync issues because keepass isn’t designed for syncing like that. I’m not gonna go back to using Google, Microsoft, or Dropbox just for keepass. I’ve considered just keeping my db file on a flash drive, but all of the keepass Android apps I tried won’t automatically detect that the file exists when I plug in the drive.
If someone has a better way for me to use it, please enlighten me.
Bitwarden is slowly turning their stuff closed-source, and I hope they don’t turn to shit, but right now it’s what works.
Adding to what the other reply said, download the syncthing fork. The official app has been under maintenance mode for a while.
