Background-Story: I did a “flatpak update” on a remote client and every package wants the PW for downloading and for installing again. I had to enter the password like 30 times or more.
It sounds like you’re trying to update system-wide flatpak packages as non-root. Most distros use polkit to allow you to update those without a password from the desktop (i.e. a local user), but usually require a password for remote users (like ssh). Just run as root: “sudo flatpak update”.
You could also migrate to a user flatpak installation instead a system-wide one. That’s what I’ve done. IMO that’s how it should be done, but that’s not the default on most distros for some reason.
Wouldn’t you just be able to terminate and then run
sudo flatpak update
?I like this.
Flatpak is so bad for single-source-of-truth for install state that you should have to put in your password every time just to confirm you understand the pain you’re signing up for.
My only advice here would be if they can change the prompt to say
THANK YOU SIR! MAY I HAVE ANOTHER! password: *******
I know a lot of people enjoy flatpak, and I enjoyed it for a couple apps that had annoying update processes in other package managers, but I’m really not impressed with it overall. Maybe it’s an unpopular opinion
Given the shortage of people working on FOSS apps, I’m all in for anything that makes their lifes easier, so tgey can focus on the programming part and don’t have to care about packaging. That can be solved with community packaging like AUR, but that has it’s own problems.
But Flatpak is one of the technologies that explicitly has the developer deal with packaging, something they are usually quite bad at because they don’t do it very often, unlike distro maintainers.
Nah, it’s pretty popular. Flatpack for the things you can’t / won’t use your regular package manager is the most common behavior.
I dunno. A lot of stuff is switching over to flatpak these days. And it is the right direction. Regular repo stuff for the system and flatpak for apps is the way to go. You can have solid base separate from the applications.
And it is the right direction.
I disagree. There’s already a universal format for deploying software on all Linux distros. It’s called “source code”.
Well there’s always Gentoo for those who want that, I suppose.
Maybe I’m talking out my ass, but it seems to be something devs like because it makes their life easier.
Flatpak/snaps are always a hard miss for me as a user, unless there’s no other option.
For users it can mean a lot better app availability since not every distro has enough maintainers to have timely updates for all their repo packages and the maintainer obviously doesn’t want to maintain it for every single distro. Less work for maintainers/devs all around, with the benefit of better app availability to the user.