The Future of Flatpak

This one hits close for me.

Flatpak is probably the best way to distribute desktop apps on Linux. I say this as an app dev, a packager, and a user. At one point I maintained close to a dozen packages.

I eagerly waited for months to see what they would do next - what magical features they would introduce. I was active on the forums helping other users package apps, helped review Flathub submissions (since it was always the same problems each time), and started checking out what PRs were happening. Silence.

The months turned into years, and as more years came, I slowly fell away from engaging with Flatpak. I'm back to using the AUR for most things (Arch, btw), but I'm quite sad to hear the situation get spelt out. Flatpak really was revolutionary; bringing modern apps and painless distribution to all desktops - LTS or rolling release. But it hasn't really changed at all since it first took off years ago.

I have almost never had a good experience with Flatpaks as a user, outside of ease of installation. They almost never integrate with the system properly. Wrong theme, wrong cursors, wrong file picker, permission issues, drag-and-drop issues. You often need extra tools that broaden the permissions of apps post-install because some feature won't work (global push-to-talk in Discord is always fun, especially with Wayland).

I couldn't care less about sandboxing if the UX sucks as a result.

If binary portability wasn't such a complete joke on Linux we wouldn't need Flatpak, but here we are.

I find Appimage to be better alternative to Flatpak: no install, persistent through linux installations, no issues with themes, icons, Xorg config; in practice - take fraction of flatpak storage size, optional sandboxing with external tools like firejail, easier to run from terminal / dmenu / rofi, very easy to tinker with and fix.

There's just one problem: they don't integrate with desktop without an additional application. We need a feature where dropping an AppImage into "~/.local/share/applications" would automatically detect it as a ".desktop" file and make it appear in the DE menus.