I’ve been involved with Linux for a long time, and Flatpak almost seems too good to be true:
Just install any app on any distro, isolated from the base system and with granular rights management. I’ve just set up my first flatpak-centric system and didn’t notice any issues with it at all, apart from a 1-second waiting time before an app is launched.
What’s your long-term experience?
Notice any annoying bugs or instabilities? Do apps crash a lot? Disappear from Flathub or are unmaintained? Do you often have issues with apps that don’t integrate well with your native system? Are important apps missing?
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I wasn’t able to get the
gsettingsmethod to work (I’m on Wayland KDE), and that article doesn’t say anything about theming QT Flatpaks. Also, after “installing” my GTK theme as a flatpak via the method described, it still wasn’t available to my GTK Flatpaks via theGTK_THEMEmethod. The steps in the itsfoss.com article do work, though there’s been a lot of squabbles about the “proper” way to expose themes to Flatpaks. Regardless, this all goes back to my point that theming Flatpak is clunky and should be much smoother.GTK_THEME is a development env var, it’s not expected to work in many cases. For example GtkSettings:gtk-theme won’t even contain it so apps can be confused.
The post details exactly how it works but yes it’s only about GTK.
You must not have xdg-desktop-portal-gtk.
I think one recent release was also bugged but it’s fixed if up to date.
I do have
xdg-desktop-portal-gtkon Debian Stable, which is currently at 1.14.1-1. I’ll look around to see if there’s more documentation on this method, because I would prefer to not use the debug variables if possible.Edit: I launched with GTK_DEBUG=interactive and I can see the theme inside the Flatpak gets set to
Adwaita-emptyinstead of my actual theme, which does get properly returned viagsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-themeThe way to test what GTK actually gets is this command:
gdbus call -e -d org.freedesktop.portal.Desktop -o /org/freedesktop/portal/desktop -m org.freedesktop.portal.Settings.Read org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-themeThat gets my normal GTK theme properly. I found a little more discussion on this here. Nothing very actionable but I did also confirm that my
xdg-desktop-portal-gtkis running. It seems like this is supposed to be working, but I have a mostly stock Debian 12.1 KDE install and something seems to be wrong somewhere in the chain. I’ve also tried multiple GTK Flatpaks with the same results.Edit: Also, I have both my themes folder exposed and the theme installed as a Flatpak via the linked script.
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