Honestly, i'm not entirely sure what Flatpaks are all about. Not sure I could explain them. But I use them. I've used apt. I've even used Pacman and Yay in Manjaro for a few years. Now, I also Flatpak (no longer on Manjaro, though. I no longer boot to a blank screen every 6 months or so! Very nice!)
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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I've heard Flatpaks aren't great at CLI tools, is that true ?
As a Nix user, I'm glad Flatpaks exist for other people, but I only ever use them when a package is not available from Nix directly. Seeing as Nix is literally the biggest package manager out there, it's a pretty rare occurrence.
Yes it is true. Flatpak is for gui apps only, at least as far as I know.
I posted this in another thread, but reposting here because a lot of people, including myself up until very recently, were under that impression:
I've packaged a CLI that I made as a flatpak. It works just fine. Nothing weird was required to make it work.
The only thing is that if you want to use a CLI flatpak, you probably want to set an alias in your shell to make running it easier.
I'm not sure why more CLIs aren't offered as flatpaks. Maybe because static linking them is so easy? I know people focus on flatpak sandboxing as a primary benefit, but I can't help but think that if static linking was easier for bigger applications, it wouldn't be needed as much.
What’s a flatpak? Is that like a worse NixOS package? I prefer NixOS, BTW.
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Honestly, I am a little scarred from snap.
Otherwise I'm agnostic on flatpaks - I've used a couple and they're ok? They just remind me of old windows games that dump all their libraries in a folder with them.
On a modern system the extra space and loss of optimisation is ok, but on older hardware or when you're really trying to push your system to run something it technically shouldn't, I can see it being an issue.
Just another tool in the toolbox. Use it or not, up to the user. I've even seen Slackware users who say they use Flatpak to ward off dependency rabbit holes.
Furniture? Integrated circuit packaging?
I like the sandboxing of Flatpak, but I prefer AppImage as I don't like having the Flatpak runtime requirement.
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theyre whatever, they have their place in my system, but inprefer installing debs from the repo
Is that supposed to be Ed Norton, or just an uncanny coincidence?
That reminds me, is Flatpak packaging CLI tools already?
Looks like it does? Or at least could?
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/740712/does-flatpak-support-command-line-applications
I've never seen one so far though
I've packaged a CLI that I made as a flatpak. It works just fine. Nothing weird was required to make it work.
The only thing is that if you want to use a CLI flatpak, you probably want to set an alias in your shell to make running it easier.
I'm not sure why more CLIs aren't offered as flatpaks. Maybe because static linking them is so easy? I know people focus on flatpak sandboxing as a primary benefit, but I can't help but think of static linking was easier for bigger applications, it wouldn't be needed as much.