The Future of Flatpak

Both flatpak and snap have been a bane with inconsistent behaviors, permissions bugs, and a bunch of stuff I never figured out. I got so frustrated with them that I wiped, put Debian on and just the old package systems.

I'd largely agree. Snap was what drove me away from Ubuntu, after the calculator app started taking ages to load. The calculator! It was instant before snapification.

I have played with using FlatPak, and while it seems snappier than snap, I always ended up with something not quite working, because of permissions or sandboxing. The answer to a lot of problems seemed to be "don't use the FlatPak version".

The set of software I use complex enough to need something like FlatPak while also not needing to interact with other things is basically very, very small.

When was this?

Snap _was_ a bit slow in the early days. It's not any more.

I use Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04 and 25.04. Snap is pretty fast these days.

I have gone around purging all my custom repos and PPAs, removing those apps, and reinstalling the snap versions. It's just easier and it works.

I am running 3 quite elderly Thinkpads in near-daily use: an X220, T420, and W520. All Core i7, all with RAM maxed out, all with SSDs. They are perfectly usable for what I need and they have great keyboards which no more modern Thinkpads do.

Ubuntu 22.04 on a 13-year-old Thinkpad loads snap apps in an eyeblink now. I can't detect any delay compared to natively-packaged apps.

Yes, it uses a bit more disk space.

I used to remove all snaps and then `apt purge snapd` but it's not worth the extra effort any more.