this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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Very interesting. I wish flatpak would offer a better CLI experience. I don't want another package managing tool, but here we are.
Can't agree more.
I believe Flatpak initially couldn't and/or didn't want to do CLI. At some point, it offered some basic functionality; I first noticed it on Bottles. But, it's pretty dire if no variation of
topcan be found as a Flatpak.I wouldn't be surprised if most people are simply unaware that Flatpak can even do CLI. This inevitably also negatively affects its CLI ecosystem.
The flatpak packaging tutorial has you build a cli app, so anyone building one is likely aware.
The real issue is invoking the commands. If you install a snap of top, you run top and it opens. If you installed a flatpak it wouldn’t be added to your PATH and even if you added the exports directory to your PATH you would need to remember to run org.gnu.top. Nobody wants to run some random flatpak run command all the time or create aliases for everything, so “flatpak isn’t for cli” becomes the mantra.
In an ideal world a flatpak could register the cli commands it wants to present to the user, and some alternatives system could manage which flatpak gets which command if there were collisions.
This has been my dream ever since I discovered Flatpak. I wish it becomes the case one day.
It's good that there has been partial progress in that direction. Let me give an example with the Floorp browser. I can do a
flatpak install floorpand I can do akillall floorpand they will work. If we can somehow get a way of accessing flatpaks as if they're regular packages via the terminal (is it possible to build a program to do this and have it packaged as a flatpak?; Maybe a program that creates a oneliner script to act as an "alias" in a directory (within $HOME so it works on immutable systems) that gets added to $PATH), that would be amazing!