Just curious to see what the communities opinions on flatpaks are here in the Cachy community. Do you use flatpaks or other similar formats or do you just use the AUR for everything? Or just compile it yourself I guess.
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I only use Flatpak for bottles and nothing else
For me Cachy repos > standard/extra repos > officially maintained flatpak > AUR > community maintained flatpak. Seems most streamlined/efficient/safest for me this way. But hey, I’m no expert.
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I avoid Flatpak and Snap as much as possible, which mean I don’t use them at all. Reason is Arch/Cachy/AUR provide’s everything I need. Also Flatpak and Snap give me the vibe they have lots of junk and out of date stuff.
I understand pkgbuild’s quite well and I’m very comfortable using Github/Gitlab so the AUR don’t scare me at all. Flatpak/Snap are scary tho!
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I just ran flatpak list and saw that I have no current flatpaks. 
I must have been thinking of my last arch-adjacent install when I had flatpaks as well as debs and rpms through Distrobox. I suppose I’ve been all in on arch repos and AUR for a little while now.
Nope,
almost done it to install gwe (recommended by the dev) it turned out that the cachyos package was better ( including start on launch / theming ootb and more)
almost done it to not have to manually add dependencies for “easyeffects” but the 1 gigs of space flatpak took made me uninstall and dl dependencies for few mbs
Me too. The other day a tested Fedora 41 because I am looking for a distro that can record system audio easily.
So I wanted to install “Sound Recorder” and when I saw that the 197.9 kB app needs an additional 844 MB of system downloads … the Fedora testing experiment ended right there! 
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Somtimes but I always try to use native packages then if it’s not in the aur I just use flatpack.
Flatpak as a last resort. Seldom. Tauon Music Box is a favorite player, but it’s a flatpak on my systems. That’s about it.
I was curious as I’ve run across a few apps like Hidamari which is offered as a flatpak (also available on AUR though). Sounds like people mostly stick to non flatpaks with Cachy. I ended up installing Hidamari with flatpak since it is the officially maintained version.
I am a simple man:
- Can I pacman?
- Can I yay?
- git clone and easy to follow README.md?
- Good day: AppImage?
- Look for an alternative.
With flatpak and, gasp, snap I feel really uneasy. They are humongous, slow and I trust them less than a wild packge from AUR where I can inspect PKGBUILD or an AppImage from a source I trust.
In this thread there are some good comments IMHO:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/6q9qw2/what_is_the_point_of_appimages/
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A single flatpak. As i can, repos and makepkg to replace the flatpaks. Down to one.
If even with tinkering the flatpak works better than the AUR package, sure.
If it’s only available as flatpak and not in the AUR, that’s what you do.
If it’s a commercial non-OSS package like Spotify, Skype, Discord, … I prefer the somewhat permission contained flatpak version.
When updating, I noticed flatpak.
I took this as an opportunity to finally remove Discover, which was useless to me.
I’m only using it for PPSSPP and only because the regular package has a blank white screen that I can’t figure out how to fix. It’s generating an image, just over-saturating it with brightness going wild - can see it where the menus are disappearing after exiting them but just for a second before it over-saturates again.
i use flatpak for a lot of things, but of recent is Telegram Desktop which is crashing on version from cachy’s repo but stable on flatpak.
I use flatpak to keep my emulators up to date and for Spotify. Lazy and simple, with the easy cost of added drive usage.
PuNES, Ares, Rosalie’s Mupen64Plus, Duckstation, PCSX2, Dolphin-Emu, RPCS3, XEMU. Easier for me to flatpak update than it is to maintain AUR packages or appimages.
As others have been commenting, flatpaks and snaps haven’t been my best friend. I hear the talk that flatpaks are the way to go because of “containerization” and such, but in practice I have found them to be like Amazon marketplace: sure, if you buy from the original manufacturer it’s fine, but (1) the shipping always sucks, (2) look at all the cheap knock-offs, and (3) why does no one seem to maintain their apps particularly well in the Flatpak ecosystem??
The answer, it seems to me, is general avoidance of flatpaks and snaps. I’m brand new to CachyOS (and ArchLinux), but I’ve used Mint, Ubuntu, etc. for many years. With this slightly older laptop I just installed Cachy on I’ll be sticking to the cachy repos and self-compiled for the most part, unless the developers have a known and very efficient install process for their stuff (like tailscale does).
I don’t really agree to this.
Of course depending on the app but Flatpaks are more up to date than normal distro packages (pure rolling release distros are the exception).
I also wouldn’t compare flatpaks and snaps. The other is “universal” and the other is used basically by one distro.
But on something like Arch, you don’t really need flatpaks unless you want to totally avoid the AUR.
I like the concept of flatpak and its more streamlined/user-friendly design, but honestly the aur is enough for me. the last time I used really used flatpak was a few years ago when I ran debian.