How Flatpaks & Open Source Make Steam Frame A Linux Playground (interview with Pierre-Loup Griffais of Valve)
Posted by asm_lover@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 45 comments
Titdirt69420@reddit
Flatpaks are great but they take up so much more disk space. So I avoid them unless absolutely needed.
MezBert@reddit
Funny to see this when Steam installs as flatpaks are consistently decreasing. Flatpaks were never really adopted in the first place, and now are just being ignored.
RabbitsandRubber@reddit
Not sure what you were expecting from this "community" where you can't even talk about a distro if it opts to use non-IBM software anywhere within userspace.
MezBert@reddit
Sounds like it. I rarely reply on r/linux but I am surprised every time by the sheer number of trolls and bots from Red Hat or supporting them. To many, it's the most toxic (Microsoft-level toxic) company in the Linux world, but I guess there are people who appreciate toxicity. And it's only just on r/linux that they get so many bots. I guess that's where the millions spent in astroturfing are the most relevant.
Fortunately, there are more open-minded communities on different subreddits.
Creepy_Leather5371@reddit
Yes, Red Hat spends millions astroturfing reddit so they can... force people to use their completely free, copyleft system utilities and package managers? Or something?
Equating Red Hat to Microsoft in evil is some coughing baby vs atomic bomb level false equivalency, you've completely lost your grip on reality if you believe that.
MezBert@reddit
Saying it's free is manipulative. They want them adopted on the free side so they force everyone on them to the corporate level and gain billions on it.
I mean Red Hat is a known corporate shark, they will do anything to remove the competition and lock the users in their ecosystem.
For Red Hat, the free part is just a means to make more money and being toxic with the competition.
male-female-r3t4rd@reddit
Next you are gonna tell us that birds aren't real and earth being a sphere is a NASA conspiracy.
Creepy_Leather5371@reddit
...I don't even know where to begin with this. I'm not even sure we are even talking about the same company. I've interacted with many Red Hat employees over the years and most of them don't know nor care what a systemd or flatpak is. All they care about is Open Shift and AAP subscriptions, the things they ACTUALLY make money on. If there were Red Hat shills in the comments, that is what they will be pushing. They aren't going to be talking about how some GPL-licensed low-level systems architecture they made 15 years ago. Hell, a lot of that stuff is not even primarily maintained by Red Hat employees anymore. You are living in a fantasy world.
dnu-pdjdjdidndjs@reddit
Tfw the opposite is true and all the red hat haters are NPCs
except me of course, a seasoned hater of dbus but respecter of pipewire
MezBert@reddit
Pipewire is probably their only decent piece of software. That's the only one I would use even if not being forced to
But the opposite is not true though, and fortunately there's evidence slowly building to verify this. We'll have this discussion again in 5 years, and I'm sure the bot astroturfing will be exposed by then.
There's already a heavy convergence of suspicions, and what was once seen as a conspiracy is now getting relatively well agreed upon.
dnu-pdjdjdidndjs@reddit
you're just schizo bro, redhat still supports a large swath of the best options at the moment, when I say things could be better I mean that I can make some better things.
Like my libinput alternative is already better but I don't have wacom tablets or whatever other nonsense so I can't test that stuff
MezBert@reddit
I see you like to throw dumb words you don't understand.
I'm schizo because I acknowledge what's currently going on? Sure pal... Flat earthers also thought people slowly proving earth is spherical were schizo....
And as said above, this is no longer widely seen as a conspiracy, but getting generally accepted now. A bit like spherical earth saw acceptance.
I don't see many best options there (except pipewire).
Gnome is losing ground because it's developer-oriented user-unfriendly workflow-adverse trash.
Gtk is behind dropped all around (Cosmic, Budgie, etc...)
libadwaita is being bypassed even by those using it (Mint who forked and patched it).
systemd is of course the most used, but it has lost a lot of credibility and somewhere around 2-3% users in the last 6 months, because better and more modern options have emerged.
wayland is globally mocked, and still struggles to pass X11 in users after 15 years. It's the best option because Red Hat took over X11 to kill it off and push their NIH solution, but it's yet another example of half-baked (and I'm using it, so I'm not even against it, but it's just not too good).
flatpaks are still as negligible as 10 years ago, and although being used on a broader range than snaps, they are still less used due to Ubuntu market share being so much higher than the rest.
The more I drop their NIH pet projects, the better, sturdier, faster my system. Simply because alternatives are generally much better. And they would be even more if Red Hat wasn't trying so hard to kill them off.
And that's a growing trend too (even Hyprland is more used nowadays on Arch than Gnome). You are stuck in the past with an outdated vision that you might want to update before being left behind.
dnu-pdjdjdidndjs@reddit
pretending wayland isnt good is just cope atp buddy
MezBert@reddit
Beyond the 10-20% fanboys, it is clearly seen as not very good. It got very slow adoption because it's flawed by design on many levels. And it's just getting more adoption because they eventually were forced to address the most common flaws (despite saying repeatedly they wouldn't do it, but the community won against their trash protocol).
dnu-pdjdjdidndjs@reddit
The protocol is flexible enough for people to do whatever they want
RabbitsandRubber@reddit
It isn't just here it's all major discussion platforms where you could formerly have an open discussion. 20-25 years ago this level of blatant censorship and astroturfing would have never been tolerated even by the most casual users. People that weren't alive back then have slurped up the propaganda and repeat it like parrots. They're proud of repeating it. They think it's going to be their ticket to a $100k+ a year salary.
Look at the modern "security" industry and what it claims is good practice. You will see people on here advocating for containers within containers within containers. You'll see them doing stuff like celebrating compatibility with even 5 year old hardware dropped for "security" reasons. Just a couple of days ago there was a thread on here filled with people advocating that you should kick sudo off your system in favor of systemd's run0. They'll happily tell you how sudo has a bad track record security wise and how it's far to much code for such a simple application. Bring up the million lines of code running as root in userspace on a system using systemd init and watch them short circuit and flood you with downvotes.
I think my favorite and one thing you can see in this thread already is the fact that they always claim there is no marketing for this garbage happening because "It's FOSS!!! It's being released by a developer doing it for free!!!". Like there aren't billions of dollars being dumped into releasing and promoting this garbage every year and all the well known developers aren't lining their pockets with Government grant money being funneled through organizations like the Linux Foundation and Rust Foundation. But if you bring that up you're labeled a conspiracy theorist despite it being very obvious that even people like Linus are on the take and lost control over their own code a long time ago. To the point where they have banned many people from contributing (and even sending mail) because "the lawyers said".
It's frankly pathetic things were allowed to get this bad in the first place. Even the so-called garbage heaps of the web where you're supposed to be able to post and say anything are so astroturfed now and had so many people banned that there is no difference between there and here. Hell many places are even embedding spyware right into the javascript now that's constantly snooping around your system. Gotta make sure you aren't a bot. Like these large mega-corps aren't the ones operating the bot farms and ddosing everything. It's always blamed on some mystery guy living in and if you point that out you're obviously part of counter-propaganda campaign to their propaganda campaign. You can't just be a regular dude that's sick of the state of the world.
I think what pisses me off the most is it's a total insult to my (and everyone else's) intelligence. They think we're so dumb that we'll actually buy this bullshit.
Look at the idiot below (I hope it's just an idiot); Promoting Flatpaks with the usual list of "features" that anyone with half a brain knows aren't real. They say it's sandboxed even though we all know it's not and even when it is it's very easy to escape. In reality, everything has very lax permissions by default because the average user wouldn't be able to run it otherwise. So it's a sandbox where three of the sides are wide open and where anyone with half a brain can jump over the fourth side trivially.
No dependency hell they say. Not true. Now you just get dependency hell within its own folder and you get it for each and every flatpak you use. Can never be sure if the libs inside are up to date either. Maybe the person shipping it will get around to updating those next year. But probably not.
You can run the new version on old distros! Like this wasn't possible before. I guess no one ever heard of chroot until it got the fancy new name. Or updating the libs (or renaming them) is a foreign to people.
No sudo required at all! Because you know it's very common for people on a system where they don't have the ability to install software to install software. Like people haven't been pulling crap into their ~ folder since the 1960s.
Easier to track and manage! When you shove your garbage into a container it suddenly becomes easier to track and manage it I guess. Since that's certainly much easier than looking in /usr/bin where you expect software to be. When it's in ~/5875849u02385940myshittyapp.com/32945085028jhlajlkd/electron/chrome/mycrappyapp it's much easier to keep up with it.
Oh and don't forget the fact that when Microsoft does it with .exe files it's really bad. Horrible practice. Same goes for static libs and all the other stuff we've shit on Windows for having for 30+ years now. But when we do the same thing only worse it's suddenly a security feature and you should totally adopt it right now. A quick rename, fancy logo and massive shilling campaign and now it's the new hip technique in the FOSS scene. Why weren't we doing it like this all along?
It's amazing. Spectacular. So much easier and WAY more secure. Just don't complain about the fact that each and every application will no longer respect your global system theme and even your mouse cursor is going to change size and theme between windows. Oh and don't complain about needing the extra 50GB because you have 10 different copies of every Gnome/KDE lib, mesa and all the other garbage you need to make these modern horrible GUI applications work. It's for security. See when Application 1's libs are 5 years out of date and Application 2's are 3 years out of date things are suddenly really really secure for reasons.
Don't you dare complain about any of this. These devs are doing it for free and this is FOSS. They don't owe you anything freeloader! We're just going to blame any security issue we caused on the programming language and compiler anyway. Since we also have millions of dollars behind a marketing campaign for a programming language that just happens to not be C/C++. But if you point that out you're a kook and we're going to ban you for shitting the place up.
I don't understand why they still call it the Linux kernel. They should call it the IBM kernel. Or maybe the NSA kernel.
The only reason there are more people loudly complaining is because most of them got banned 10+ years ago already and moved on. None of my servers are on Linux and they haven't been on Linux for a long time. The problems within the kernel itself are impossible to fix at this point and even if someone tried their diffs would never be accepted. If you think userspace is bad just try grepping through the 10+ million lines of code for the kernel now. Or is it up to 20 million? Hard to know because they're constantly bolting on millions of more lines every year without auditing any of it. Hell the DRM for my modern GPU is several million lines by itself. That's before you get anywhere near the garbage heap that is systemd with its million+ lines of garbage code and people using this garbage feel like they have a right to lecture to anyone about security.
I'm surprised the internet works at all. With any luck someone will set this trash on fire soon and we can go back to a world where we don't have to listen to all these know-it-all dumbasses shitting up every last place where you can have a discussion on the web. Hell it's so bad even LWN is owned by one of the worst "marketing" companies in the west that makes millions of dollars a year copy/pasting mailing list posts with no shame and people pay for this.
Madness. It's madness. Some days I feel like I'm the last sane person left but now and again through the noise I run into someone like you. I swear the industry wasn't like this when I first got into it.
RabbitsandRubber@reddit
Heh before I could even read my own post it got flooded with downvotes. But there aren't any automated bots downvoting posts that trip certain keywords here.
There aren't any people so obsessed with running damage control who have stuff like google alerts set-up to find mentions of their own name and project names either.
If you're aware of the above facts you're obviously getting paid to post here.
Pro-tip: They always accuse you of doing exactly what they're doing.
InfiniteSheepherder1@reddit
Flatpak installs of Steam have increased though, what are you talking about. While every year flathub sees more downloads then ever. The rise of bootc based distros is also going to push it more even if one of the biggest Bazzite does package install Steam.
MezBert@reddit
They have consistently decreased over the last few years. Last few months stats are clear about this. Stop lying because it doesn't fit your narrative.
Flathub might see more downloads. But it's like LPG, it's still marginal, and dying off in the overall picture before it even picked up.
As for bootc based distros rising, it's mostly just on Fedora ecosystem. It's not very relevant compared to bigger distros and ecosystems.
InfiniteSheepherder1@reddit
You do understand a shrinking % of a growing number can mean the number of users is growing right. Its peak was 7.4% a year ago in March, to 0% last month to 4.16% this month on Steam Survey.
At the same time March of 2025 saw 2.33% of Steam users running Linux to a jump of 4.5% of Steam users running Linux April 2026.
A nearly doubling of Linux users on Steam, while yes as a % Flatpak usage has declined, there would have been a slight increase in number of people using it, but March was also its peak usage and looking at the wider trend line it is flat if a bit moving upward.
Imagine 7.4% of 100 so 7.4 users, now imagine 4.16% of 193, so now you have 9.51 users. The % went down but the number of users increased. Steam Survey tends to be pretty noisy and jumps around a lot
SteamOS has been shrinking as a % of Linux users on Steam since its release, but that does not mean the total number of installs of SteamOS has decreased.
MezBert@reddit
I realize that you're deflecting. I can't share pictures here, but the trend is a month to month downhill from at least 2 years ago, and that is not accounting for the 0. And no, it doesn't reflect growth in absolute despite what you claim.
dnu-pdjdjdidndjs@reddit
I use bootc and never use flatpak because of how unusable it is partially due to flathub and how badly designed portals/dbus are but honestly as time goes on I just get more and more disillusioned with the linux software stack its like im in the matrix and all I see is the code and now I hate everything I see
InfiniteSheepherder1@reddit
Really?
We run bootc based Fedora at work and everything is a Flatpak for installs and we have been really happy with it.
Hadi_Chokr07@reddit
> Flatpaks were never really adopted in the first place, and now are just being ignored.
All in his head?
MezBert@reddit
In stats. They are clearly negligible as a means of install.
Hadi_Chokr07@reddit
For Steam, yes. For everything else? No.
DoubleOwl7777@reddit
and especially for vr if you use flatpak steam you are in a world of pain.
ChocolateSpecific263@reddit
actually flatpak should drop its isolation stuff atomic distros handles it better
cidra_@reddit
How? NixOS doesn't provide isolation as far as I fan tell
cidra_@reddit
It's insane how much well-matched Flathub is even, for ARM devices.
AnEagleisnotme@reddit
No thunderbird though for some reason
lazy_lombax@reddit
wasn't it added just a few weeks ago? it was on trending too
AnEagleisnotme@reddit
Nope, it isn't available on my laptop
lazy_lombax@reddit
I'm surprised if Mozilla didn't package an arm binary cause they do have macos and even mobile builds which I'd presume are arm builds.
probably give it time
cidra_@reddit
Because Mozilla. Firefox non-ESR got its Arm version released on Flathub just less than a year ago.
Betterbird does have an ARM release, though.
felipec@reddit
There's absolutely zero value in using Flatpak. If you install a package and then remove it, your system returns to the state before installing. That's not a difference.
It's just marketing to promote their solution that brings absolutely no advantages.
Creepy_Leather5371@reddit
What am I reading... First its an open source project ran mostly by volunteers, what "marketing"? Second I've been a Linux sysadmin for the last five years mostly working on ancient RHEL 8 and Debian 12, maintaining my own repo. Flatpaks solve many problems and my job would be way harder without them.
Imagine needing something from EPEL and needing to download 30 dependencies and hoping none of them conflict with whatever packaging jank is on the machine. With Flatpak, it would be like 5, not including the runtimes I already have which just work with everything like magic. Not to mention there are many applications only supported in flatpak anyway. The real question is what are the disadvantages, slightly more disk space?
dnu-pdjdjdidndjs@reddit
linux needs to rewrite user namespaces in rust and disable half the kernel features then we can finally call flatpak a sandbox
ImNotABotScoutsHonor@reddit
Do you mind expounding on that a little? I'm not overly familiar with Flatpak.
dnu-pdjdjdidndjs@reddit
flatpak/bubblewrap uses user namespaces which are a linux feature which let you spawn things in isolated (logically in code) environments without virtualization
this functionally lets you give programs an isolated userspace environment except for the holes you punch in (sockets, mounted files, etc) but the entire kernel attack surface is still visible
There's also situations where apps will want to confine themselves further, but there's a big issue: giving permission to spawn new user namespaces lets you create environments with permissions like CAP_NET_ADMIN (permission to talk to privileged parts of the kernel) so by default giving a program access to unprivileged user namespaces is an LPE risk unless the kernel enforces that the caller has to be in the initial namespace ("real root")
So basically flatpak has to act as a sandbox broker allowing sandboxes in the sandbox to sandbox more by preventing privilege expansion in a tree basically
This is why you hear people saying flatpak breaks chromium sandbox and stuff like that, apps have to special case how they get new namespaces.
If you ask me, this should be like a "sandboxd" thing and then
What I meant by the kernel thing is, the kernel code is actually insane, like genuinely absurd at times. Some parts are good but it doesn't matter, because anything you can theoretically call or influence from userspace is part of the TCB and is in scope to be a target of attack.
Android is super suspicious of kernel features that aren't actively used so they strip out a bunch of kernel features, whereas desktop linux distros typically just soft blacklist modules requiring them to be modprobe'd by root first. Any not in that list can be loaded in by using a prerequisite feature (how copyfail works)
On android you cant even use io uring, each app has a new uid with strict selinux rules, and ipc is done over a custom kernel module that's required to be accessed through kotlin/java (safe) apis
So in bwrap, exploits like copyfail or any similar exploit that can reasonably be discovered in any of the autoloadable modules on linux give you a full container escape and root access unless you have some obscure set of seccomp (syscall filters) applied
So in practice, bubblewrap is the most performance friendly way to logically isolate apps, but provides zero defense against kernel exploits that allow sandbox escapes. To protect against the kernel, theoretically the best option is a lean microkernel based on capabilities which has other limitations in practice, but for linux the obvious approach is to stop putting so many things in the kernel. Not everything needs to be in the kernel. Many system level things are already not in the kernel and could be offloaded to userspace.
More kernel code has to be written in rust, anything new should probably be forced to be rust. It's nonsense that any vendor can have a product that needs a kernel driver or module and they can just throw their shit into the kernel and then any time that device is plugged in you're now subject to any vulnerabilities in the code they wrote.
carlwgeorge@reddit
This is not nothing, but I think the benefits are overblow. Similar to containers, sandboxing has a usability impact that requires careful management. Many flatpaks work around this by preloading permissions that disable parts of the sandbox. Just telling people that flatpaks are sandboxed leads to a false sense of security that ignores those preloaded permissions. I recommend checking which of your flatpak apps have
filesystem=hostorfilesystem=homepermission.Flatpaks can have dependency problems too. "Maintainer can make mistakes" is not a benefit of one technology over the other.
Legitimately cool feature, and in my opinion the primary benefit of flatpaks.
Flatpak defaults to system wide installs, and non-root users are allowed to install via polkit rule. Guess what that polkit rule checks? Membership in the wheel (or equivalent) group, just like sudo. If typing out the sudo command is a pain point for you, then you can use the pkcon command to install native system packages via polkit rule instead of sudo.
Flatpak does have the
--userflag do operations per-user, but it's not default and isn't even mentioned in the flathub setup instructions, which also has to be done per-user. Again, a cool feature that is nice to have, but it's not quite as simple as it's usually presented.Flatpak and native package managers all have commands for listing, removing, and installing things. For me tracking and managing is far easier with dnf/rpm, but I know that's based on my experience with those tools, and I recognize that others may be more familiar with flatpak tooling.
30 dependencies is not in itself a problem, especially when they're likely tiny. Would you rather have 30 dependencies with a total size of a few megabytes, or five dependencies with a total size of a few gigabytes? Flatpak runtimes contain a huge amount of software, native system packages just split them up more. Neither approach is inherently right or wrong, they're just different.
As an aside, if you see an EPEL package has conflicts, please file a bug.
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/bugzilla-file-a-bug/
And there are applications that are only available as native system packages, or only available as snaps, or only available as appimages. This isn't an advantage of the tooling, it's just a result of maintainer choices. The cool thing is you can use all of the above and don't have to stress about which one is "better".
Not slightly, significantly more disk space. Also lack of dependency cleanup on removal or upgrade, exacerbating the disk space problem. Also sandbox headaches and various integration issues. Flatpaks are useful but are not without fault.
C0rn3j@reddit
That, and slightly less performance. Though looking at the seccomp thread again, it seems the worst case went from 20% less to about 1%~ less, which is irrelevant, so I guess the only "problem" that remains is a bit of extra space taken.
https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/4187
lmpcpedz@reddit
My only petty gripe with flatpak is, I get to have two seperate, full blown, versions of mesa drivers on my system. one for my games and another for flatpak apps... i don't need two mesa drivers lol.
Saxasaurus@reddit
It is annoying, but the benefit is that it ensures app portability. If an app needs a mesa version that newer than what the user has on their system, that's fine, the flatpak app uses the newer flatpak'd mesa. Or if a new version of mesa has a regression, the flatpak app doesn't hit that regression just because the system mesa got updated.
bravecrow9738@reddit
Valve content always lands well here and i think its because Pierre-Loup and that team are one of the few cases where corporate Linux contributions are actually tangible and ongoing. Not just a press release. The Flatpak angle is interesting too, a lot of that tooling has ended up benefiting the whole distro space way beyond gaming.