Be aware librewolf and all firefox based browser have security issues with flatpak because flatpak by forcing seccomp filtering breaks the internal sandbox of the browser:

https://librewolf.net/installation/linux/#security

Not to mention the librewolf flatpak is literary the portable tarball they release that works on your distro already, in other words it is the worst way possible to use librewolf.

And you only get that “ease of use” of being able to install it in the software store with one click because your distro did the pain of installing and configuring flatpak for you, otherwise it would have been much worse than what you posted.

Anyways, try using appman instead:

wget -q https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ivan-hc/AM/main/AM-INSTALLER && chmod a+x ./AM-INSTALLER && ./AM-INSTALLER

And then: appman -i librewolf which will “install” the AppImage and you can also sandbox it with am --sandbox librewolf and this sandbox does not break the internal sandbox of the browser unlike flatpak.

AppImage isn’t a good comparison for a lot of different reasons

Alright what does flatpak offer in this case?

• Has performance issues 1

• The thing is not XDG Base dir compliant 1 2

• Has security issues even 1 2 3 and not to mention the whole bunch of flatpaks that use EOL runtimes which are even worse, not only for security, but also because that single flatpak ends up pulling an entire runtime for itself which makes even more bloated.

• And is insanely bloated as you saw already.

I think enough people have summarised that on the internet by now.

Such as? but I likely know already what is going to be said, hopefully is none of the following:

• “Depends on libfuse2” (not true since 2022 with the static appimage runtime, this also allows making appimages that work on musl systems, which several like ghostty, goverlay, Steam, gimp, cromite, citron already do)

• “You need to build on an old distro and it is hard”, once again not true anymore since you can now bundle the glibc as well (and it is needed for appimages to work on musl systems).

• “No wayland”, this is only true if you use linuxdeploy-qt to make the AppImage, the project has been abandoned already for several years and the only project I know that still uses it is qbittorrent-enhanced.

EDIT: And also hopefully you are aware that a lot of flatpaks are literary an AppImage shipped in a flatpak runtime, like:

• https://github.com/flathub/dev.vencord.Vesktop/blob/master/dev.vencord.Vesktop.yml#L34-L46

• https://github.com/flathub/com.ultimaker.cura/blob/master/com.ultimaker.cura.yml#L24-L44

• https://github.com/flathub/xyz.armcord.ArmCord/blob/master/xyz.armcord.ArmCord.yml#L40-L43

• https://github.com/flathub/com.heroicgameslauncher.hgl/blob/master/com.heroicgameslauncher.hgl.yml#L191-L196

• https://github.com/flathub/chat.simplex.simplex/blob/master/chat.simplex.simplex.yml#L22-L31

• https://github.com/flathub/menu.kando.Kando/blob/master/menu.kando.Kando.yml#L33-L40

So yeah AppImage isn’t ideal, lets ship it in a container anyway 😁

and through deduplication between different runtimes and runtime versions. There’s usually very little bloat, if any, especially if you use Flatpaks a lot,

~20 different GUI applications, flatpak ended up using 14 GiB of storage while the appimage equivalent used 3.2 GIB.

And note I was not able to find flatpaks for ghostty, goverlay, kdeconnect and a few other apps, meaning the actual bloat of flatpak is even higher.

Edit: And this is even worse if you are an nvidia user, flatpak will download the entire nvidia driver as well.

Unfortunately because PopOS is based on debian/ubuntu, they tend to split packages into a million pieces, so something that would have a simple pacman -Syu mesa vulkan-radeon on archlinux to get the video drivers is like 6 different packages on debian which I don’t know the names of.

Fedora is the testing ground of red hat, they are known for pushing a lot of breaking changes constantly, even more than Archlinux or other rolling release distros. A while back they pulled this nonsense that we had to deal with that not even upstream approves of.

So my only distro recommendation is archlinux or some archlinux fork, every time I have had to help people with distro issues they all eventually ended up in arch because all other distros have some weird issue that’s a deal breaker. Just don’t rely too much on the Aur.

My other suggestion is that you get most of your software as appimage thru AM: https://github.com/ivan-hc/AM

We ship Steam as an AppImage with a lot of common fixes that affect the flatpak version or native versions of steam (you can check them in the readme), and you don’t have to deal with the hassle of setting up the 32bit repo and installing Steam for example.

Processes are still isolated through nested seccomp filters.

You don’t have namespaces still…

For reference, chromium will not launch without that, you have to pass the --no-sandbox flag and brave iirc disabled that all together.

Not really an issue with chromium because you do have working namespaces sandbox thru zypack, although some disagree that this is safe

Would highly recommend against anything that “updates itself.”

Disable the self updates in that case… before you were saying that AppImages had no way to self update and now are saying that you don’t recommend it?

You want someone in the stream to do some sort of validation.

Also what validation are we talking about? the one that flathub does? The most you will get is recognizing that the application comes from upstream, you can even ship pre-compiled binaries thru flathub.

There is a reason we use centralized management.

Such as?

EDIT:

I also don’t want every app trying to check for updates.

With AppImage you have this outside the application thru the zsync delta updates, the info is embedded in the appimage and it is checked by appimageupdatetool, appimagelauncher, and similar and let you know when there is an update available without the application itself doing the check.

Thank you, it seems every way I go i make the wrong choice lol

Welcome to linux.

What you were told about appimage depending on legacy stuff is also not true, it is the libfuse2 dependency, which hasn’t been a dependency of AppImage for 3 years (though some projects haven’t updated yet).

It also isn’t a big deal if you run into an appimage that still depends on it, archlinux which is a rolling release distro, some of its packages like mtpfs and ntfs-3g still depend on libfuse2 as well. And you can still run the AppImage by setting the env variable APPIMAGE_EXTRACT_AND_RUN=1 to avoid having to install libfuse2 in those cases.

They are very dated and depend on legacy stuff that often was dropped by the distro

Is it libfuse2? This has no longer been a dependency with the static appimage runtime, which released in 2022!

Although most notable, electron apps still by default use the old runtime, because electron-builder hasn’t updated the appimage runtime.

Besides that AppImage do not depend on legacy stuff.

They are also terrible for security since there is no way of pushing out updates.

This was never true lmao.

Do not use flatpak for firefox based browsers because it breaks it namespaces sandbox.

Firefox releases a portable binary that self updates.

flatpak works by using bubblewrap which creates namespaces for the applications you use, essentially the root gets swapped for a fake root, this is how docker, podman, etc work.

This contradicts their own wiki. Type 2 AppImages do use libfuse2, which is the problem

appimagekit is not actively developed anymore. Development moved to AppImage/appimagetool and type2-runtime

EDIT: Also go-appimage which was the first one to use the static runtime in 2022.

So no, they do not need libfuse2 anymore. Stop saying that nonsense, Download the AppImage of Cemu or PCSX2 or Ryujinx and remove libfuse2 and see for yourself…

Even in the github thread you linked it is said that namespaces are enabled by default in the kernel nowadays

Yeah and ubuntu recently fucked it up with namespaces restrictions.

Docker, where another kernel, package manager etc. gets loaded.

Docker doesn’t load another kernel, no idea if it can either, flatpak is pretty much another package manager as well. By your own definition it is another distro.

However if you want to be taken serious in your criticism please inform yourself on what you’re criticize

they simply don’t fix the libfuse2 issue

Fixed 3 years ago

Neither Flatpak nor Snap run “another distro inside”

The flatpak runtimes are huge and are another distro in practice, just check the contents of the gnome runtime and you will see it is another distro.

Flatpak also depends on namespaces which paranoid distros disable and cause issues. Which the person you responded to talked about it and you ignored all together lol

Xfce is on GTK3 and there are no plans to migrate to GTK4.