Gradience, Flatseal, Loupe Image Viewer, and Resources running on Ubuntu 16.04

Firefox 118.0.2 running on Ubuntu 16.04

Door Knocker, Collision, and Cartridges running on Ubuntu 16.04

ASHPD Demo running on Ubuntu 16.04, showing a notification through XDG portals

According to Door Knocker, almost half of the portals are unavailable on Ubuntu 16.04, compared to only one unavailable on Fedora 39 with GNOME, which means Flatpaks running here may have more limited capabilities than usual.

  • LinuxSBC@lemm.ee
    201·
    8 months ago

    As well as running on all distros, it also provides other benefits:

    • You can run modern software on old/stable distros
    • Dependencies being (mostly) included in the package means that different applications can more easily have different versions of dependencies
    • Finicky packages are more stable for that same reason
    • Distro maintainers don’t need to package as many applications, and application maintainers don’t need to worry about multiple distros and versions of dependencies

    However, some applications don’t work as well because of the sandbox, but I think this will change with the rising popularity of Flatpak, as more developers will use portals instead of direct access. Also, there are some bugs and missing features, like how heavy use of the org.freedesktop.Flatpak portal for dbus causes a memory leak (https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-dbus-proxy/issues/51), but it’s overall pretty good. Most applications I use are Flatpaks.