A big issue for me is using FlatPak for development tools. I have queried this in the past on this forum and not found a general solution, in fact I was not offered any constructive help.
I use VSCode for Dart and Go and I use Netbeans for java. I also use FileZilla to manage a web application that I develop on Clear Linux and deploy to a RaspberryPi on my local network.
I could not use VScode as a FlatPak. I had install it manually because the sandbox could not see the bin directories for Dart and Go. It was also not able to see the environment variables defined for Java, Go and Dart. In fact I struggled for hours to get it to work, using FlatPak overrides solved some issues but the results were inconsistent and could not be undone without re-installation (it really should not be this difficult!).
I also loaded FIleZilla but I cannot get FileZilla to use the system editor, gedit, because it it outside it’s sandbox and does not exist in FlatPak space. In fact I cannot get it to use any editor without throwing an error.
Netbeans could not find my JDK for the same reasons. I had to do another manual install outside of swupd and the software app.
This is a HUGE issue for me as these tools are effectivly broken in FlatPak form. I have asked on this forum for assistance but not received any. There MUST be a solution, I cannot be the only one, but I do not think I should have to spend hours trawling the web to find it. If FlatPak breaks these tools then the installation details should explain what to do to get plugins and external resources to work within the confines of the FlatPak.
How can you package tools that REQUIRE external resources in a FlatPak, it breaks the functionality.
Flatpak isn’t really meant for this scenario. Period.
Let me try and explain why we have flatpak - about 2-3 years back, Clearlinux had very little end user GUI applications. We knew already it was going to take us a very long time to package many of these and even the, some are just things we can’t ship for various reasons (proprietary etc.). However, it instantly gave every clearlinux user access to almost 300 applications. That allowed us to focus on things like the overall GUI, installer etc. and make more progress in other areas.
However, many software programs don’t make much sense to run in a restricted sandbox and they need access to outside resources. Flatpak has the problem that it’s not really possible to export multiple binaries into a flatpak, and device node access and drive access is difficult at best. For things like media players, it’s relatively simple because “videos” is a known export. But for things like “Java development workspace” there is no equivalent XDG export directory, and nobody puts these workspaces in “Documents” either. So essentially all flatpak IDE’s are broken.
The proper solution is that we add these IDEs one by one as bundles to Clearlinux. You can request these by filing a ticket on our github tracker. Some IDEs are already bundled, and, we’ll do our best to add new ones especially if they’re widely used.
(Why does the forum mangle this link? It’s a link to our issue tracker)