garden/flatpak.md

• a tool.
  • packaging system distribution independent
  • pet peeves
    • It is frustrating to me you can search by name, e.g. flatpak search projectm, and install by name, e.g. flatpak install projectm, but you can't run by short name, that is, flatpak run projectm doesn't work.
      • This is made worse by the fact that flatpak search projectm may or may not show you the fully qualified name for the package; if your terminal is wide enough it will, but otherwise it will very unhelpfully take up a lot of the line to describe the package but mangle the fully qualifier identifier (what you need to pass to flatpak run) with an ellipsis.
      • I don't know of a good way to work around this currently. It seems like adding a flatpak easyrun command would be low hanging fruit? Just run the installed app that matches the search term, if there's exactly one?
    • By default flatpak apps are heavily sandboxed to the point they can't access files in your home directory.
      • That's... alright I guess if you care about security that much, but a bit of an unfriendly/unexpected user experience. It made me feel I was using a phone and not a "proper" computer I control.
      • Thankfully this led me to discover flatseal, which is actually a great UI to manage sandbox permissions of all kinds per-app. I flipped the right access, restarted projectm, and I was able to load presents from my home directory :)