Some of the Flatpak problems I had:
- I am using Dbeaver for database operations and flatpak had problems with mysql while Dumping or Restoring DB.
- On Mission Center, it wasn’t showing icons but AppImage version showed it correctly. I had to create an issue for this https://gitlab.com/mission-center-devs/mission-center/-/work_items/500 to find out this.(Anyway later they also fixed it on flatpak)
- On Podman Desktop, it doesn’t show the remote connections, but the normal release version (zipped one) shows correctly.
- I use PlayOnLinux to manage wine versions and wineprefix environments with windows applications. Deb version from 15 years has 20 times more features than the current v5 flatpak version. I had to lose many days just to work with flatpak one.
- As an example, the app needed to access to external drive but it wasn’t able to just because the it decided to only get permission for user filesystem. So I had to run with ‘sudo flatpak override org.phoenicis.playonlinux --filesystem=host’, but it didn’t work either. So I had to mount the file inside the apps’ folder etc… You almost always need to change permissions of flatpak app using flatseal because current permissions are never enough. (It might be the responsability of whoever made that Flatpak but most of the time they release without testing enough)
- On Brave Browser, https://brave.com/linux/#flatpak official page literally states that it is not working as well as native packages and in addition, it modifies Chromium sandboxing in ways which have not been vetted by the Brave or Chromium security teams.
- Flatpak Spotify is the first option that comes on Software store and it’s not the official application.
- For screenshot, I use flameshot application and and on flatpak version, it was giving me D-Bus errors so again solution was to use the native package.
- Terminal access is another problem, normal you access to apps by writing firefox, but with flatpak you can only access with “flatpak run org.mozilla.firefox” and for most of the apps it’s not even easy to remember and with these kind of commands you cannot access to app parameters.
- It also has with basic drag and drop. On one of the apps (I don’t remember which one) you want to drag a file and get “File: .. is empty and can't be sent.” and again you need to give access manually. Also, on Pinta app (most popular MSPaint alternative) and it didn’t let me drag a image to an empty canvas. (Might be the problem of pinta itself)
- I had firefox as flatpak and when I was pasting the path of a file to address bar it can’t find the path. (It finds for ~/Downloads folder so /home/myusername/Downloads/x.pdf works but doesn’t find ~/Documents folder even though they have the same permissions). If I open with “Open with” then it shows sth like file:///run/user/1000/doc/ac1fe048/
I had many more issues like this that I don’t even remember so now I only use flatpaks if there is no other method(appimage, native apt/deb, snap..). People say it’s for security but it makes me create issues for problems instead of doing my work. I have the same problem with wayland and that’s why I use x. If you check you’ll see that on many issues on Zorin forum, the first thing they recommend is to use native packages or switch to x11 to see if it’s resolved.