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?

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
    4·
    8 months ago

    All you need is to put

    #!/usr/bin/bash
flatpak run org.gimp.Gimp $*

    in .local/bin/gimp or /usr/local/bin and you can just call gimp image.png. A basic alias in your bashrc works, too.

    • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
      187·
      8 months ago

      That’s a pain in the ass. Why not automate it with the install? They already create .desktop files FFS.

          • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
            4·
            8 months ago

            It did for me, but I broke it somehow (I really need to reinstall my desktop). According to the Arch docs, the exports directory is added to /etc/profile

            As for why it’s not done upstream, this seems to be the thread where Flatpak’s considerations were mentioned: https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/3573

            I don’t want to auto-add the wrapper dirs to the real PATH, because such a modification is bound to break a lot of users setups.

            I don’t necessarily agree with them, but it should answer the “why” question.

            • AProfessional@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              8 months ago

              They are only aliases too. People will be disappointed if they expect it to behave like the unsandboxed command.

        • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
          42·
          8 months ago

          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.Gimp version.

          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… 🤦