I am currently using Linux Mint (after a long stint of using MX Linux) after learning it handles Nvidia graphics cards flawlessly, which I am grateful for. Whatever grief I have given Ubuntu in the past, I take it back because when they make something work, it is solid.
Anyways, like most distros these days, Flatpaks show up alongside native packages in the package manager / app store. I used to have a bias towards getting the natively packed version, but these days, I am choosing Flatpaks, precisely because I know they will be the latest version.
This includes Blender, Cura, Prusaslicer, and just now QBittorrent. I know this is probably dumb, but I choose the version based on which has the nicer icon.
/var/lib/flatpak/app/org.gnu.emacs/current/active/export/bin/org.gnu.emacsis not what I expect a Unix system to want me to type if I want to run Emacs. Nor isflatpak run org.gnu.emacs. These are tools built by someone whose mental model of running Unix software is “click the icon in the Gnome launcher”. That’s one aspect what I’m describing as not being “simple”. I don’t want my mental model of how to run Unix software to include “remember how you installed it and then also remember the arbitrary reverse-FQDN-ish string you need to use to tell flatpak to run it”. If I’m honest, that alone is sufficient to signal it wasn’t built for me. I could work around it for sure with shell aliases, but I could also just not use it, and that seems fine for me.I agree that launching flatpaks outside of a GUI is stupidly verbose. I certainly would never use flatpak for cli tools, and I think that is a problem for it. I would love to see more tools bundled up that way, but flatpak is far from the solution. And Docker has the same or bigger problems.
And in a way, everything is a CLI tool on most normal systems. Evince or Acroread or whatever you prefer to read PDFs is not “a CLI tool”, but if I want to use LaTeX to create a document, I want to be able to do something like
I don’t want to have to build my document, bring up my app launcher, click on the Evince icon, hit Ctrl-O, navigate to my pdf file, and double click it.
This. Having to open a console to run a flatpak in bspwm is annoying as all hell. PWA’s are just as bad, I ended up writing a script I could run from dmenu:
#!/usr/bin/env bash PWA_PATH=${HOME}/.local/share/applications for app in $@ do DESKTOP=$(grep -i "Name=.*${app}" -lm 1 ${PWA_PATH}/*.desktop) if [ ! -z ${DESKTOP} ] then APPID=$(basename ${DESKTOP} | cut -d- -f2) /usr/bin/google-chrome --profile-directory=Default --app-id=${APPID} & fi done