I have been for awhile. It also all exists in my home directory, so when I format my root and throw a different OS on, all my flatpaks are ready to go without installing any native packages. It's just a more consistent experience using flatpaks.
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Whoa. I had not considered backing Home that way! That is slick.
Honestly, reinstalling or moving to a new distro is such a bear precisely due to the time setting up my environment and all the software. I KNOW I can script all this, or at least have a list of packages I use, but it does not really work when different package managers use different naming schemes.
I'd rather have 5GB of binaries than deal with unmet dependencies one more time (despite many people claims, it is still easy to fall into), my only criticism for flatpak though, is that any kind of modification for a file requires you to navigate through at least ten directories.
I haven't used any flatpacks, mostly because they don't seem to have a good solution for running terminal programs. (Also I don't like that the application developer chooses the permissions to expose rather than the user.
However, I have been using bubblewrap which is what flatpack uses under the hood to sandbox. This allows me to run both gui and non-gui programs, and I have the control of exposing the minimum required permissions that I'm comfortable giving an untrusted piece of software.
I will be honest and reveal my naivete about the permissions. I don't really mess with permission for any program, but I can see how some defaults may be bad.
I will look into bubble wrap, since the sandboxing is important, but the sheer convenience and availability of software is what is appealing.
Flatpaks are my second choice when there isn't a recent enough version in the repos. They're fine but take 1. too much storage space, and 2. are usually slower
yes
nice
Nice!