I love Flatpaks, the programs are nicely separated so they don’t interfere with each other. They also don’t have flaws like Snap’s low performance or Nix’s complexity.
But being limited to only graphical apps seems like a real drawback. If one wants to use Flatpaks as their primary package manager there have to be some awkward workarounds for cli programs.
E.g., the prime Flatpak experiene is supposed to be on immutable distros like Silverblue. But to install regular cli programs you are expected to spin up a distrobox (or toolbox) and install those programs there.
Having one arch distrobox where I get my cli programs from will not work, as the package entropy over time will get me the very dependency issues that Flatpak wants to solve.
So what is the solution here? Have multiple distroboxes and install packages in those in alternation and hope the boxes don’t break? Use Nix alongside Flatpak? Use Snaps?
flatpak run org.gimp.Gimp image.pngvs.gimp image.pngor evenxdg-open image.png. “Mildly unwieldy” I suppose but a massive pain in the ass in practice. I can’t believe they thought that it was a good idea to require all that and provide no way to create a script in /usr/local/bin or even .local/bin.echo 'alias gimp="flatpak run org.gimp.Gimp"' >> ~/.bash_profileOh my God I never thought of that! /s
What a pain in the ass to require me to maintain a set of aliases for everything I install. Great user experience.
And the other 125 flatpaks I have?
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That’s a pain in the ass. Why not automate it with the install? They already create .desktop files FFS.
It is actually. Add /var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin to PATH.
This is the answer! Next question is why doesn’t the flatpack install do this for you?
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They are only aliases too. People will be disappointed if they expect it to behave like the unsandboxed command.
Flatpak should not be adding directories to $PATH. That is for the distribution or user to do
Really? That’s a thing? I don’t mind a one-time PATH modification and was excited to see this but… I don’t see that path on my system. Maybe it’s optional and none of my applications are using it?
I also don’t see any mention of that in the flatpak.org setup steps. And almost nobody replying here even knows about it. And all of the examples of running a flatpak from the CLI on flatpak.org and flathub.org use the
flatpak run org.gimp.Gimpversion.So it seems like it’s a feature, but it’s poorly documented, poorly advertised, and not used… :-(
Edit: So I did find that directory on another system of mine. No idea why it’s there on one and not the other. Maybe a version thing. And gimp is symlinked as “org.gimp.Gimp”. What a failure… 🤦
https://github.com/DLopezJr/fp may help until flatpak solves the usability issue
Flatpak should export mimetypes so xdg-open should work if there isn’t another handler registered
You mean it already does. (“should” can be vague)
I believe so. (Depending on how your OS packages flatpak)