Flatpaks are special apps that are sandboxed, and are from special repositories. The most popular Flatpak repository is Flathub, where anyone can put any Flatpak. Also, Flatpaks work for over 27 distros, which make it a good choice for deploying software. In this post, i’ll show you how to get Flatpak, and the basics of Flatpaks.
Installation
It depends on your distribution, they have a setup page that shows you how to install it. Page link: https://flatpak.org/setup/
Once you installed Flatpak, just restart your computer, and it’s done! You can use Flatpaks. Note that the instructions are for Flathub, which is the repository we will get the apps from.
Downloading and Installing some apps
You can search for an app there: https://flathub.org/home. Once you found the app, follow the steps there. You can also use a GUI Software Center, such as Discover, Octopi, and Gnome Software.
Basic Commands
Those commands are for the flathub repository, if you are using another repository, change flathub to the name of the repository you are using.
- Installing:
flatpak install flathub [package name] - Removing:
flatpak uninstall flathub [package name] - Run:
flatpak run [package name] - Update:
flatpak update [optional package name]
Should you use it?
I personally don’t use flatpaks much, because i prefer the AUR. However, when i was on Kubuntu, i was using Flatpak a lot. Also, Flatpak has much better theming than snaps, so if you use snaps, you might consider switching to Flatpak. I would recommend not downloading anything from any Flatpak repository unless your official package manager’s repositories do not have them. For Arch, i would prefer the AUR from Flatpak.