Really my main point of doing this was to try something different. I’ve been neutral on flatpak this whole time. I’ve never had problems with native installs, but I’m also a little judicious on what I try to install on my systems. The point of this exercise was to flip those habits.

About flatpaks, I’ve learned:

• a ton of stuff I installed via AUR is available as a flatpak
• some flatpak apps seem to be a little less buggy than the native installs for some reason… (Thunderbird specifically)
• flatpaks use more disk space

Distrobox has also been cool because I usually don’t like to install random crap on my machine, but with Distrobox I’ve been doing just that. I can install random C++ libraries, Node, Haskell, Postgres, etc and not worry about polluting my main system I actually care about. In the past, I would take some time to consider if I should really install this random thing. And yes, I’d pacman -Rs pkg if it didn’t pan out.

I’m not sure if I’ll keep running the system like this, but so far it’s been interesting to run things a little differently.

Things I’ve liked:

• Thunderbird flatpak is less buggy than Thunderbird native
• Managing flatpak apps via Software Center or flatpak is easy/nice
• Distrobox seems useful for working on different types of software projects

Things I don’t personally care about (but other people might and that’s fine):

• using more disk space
• the fact that my main system is still mutable

Things I didn’t like:

• nothing so far
• I actually went in thinking I was gonna have to fight
• with the flatpak permissions, but everything has worked
• fine so far, so… not sure what I don’t like.
• maybe I’ll hit a snag soon and then I’ll change my mind

Honestly, just because I’m the most comfortable in Arch. I tried VanillaOS briefly, but it was way too annoying to install tailscale, so I went back to what I know.

Luckily, I’m able to afford more than an 8GB SSD on my laptop. 😆

$ podman system df
TYPE           TOTAL       ACTIVE      SIZE        RECLAIMABLE
Images         2           1           2.775GB     2.293GB (83%)
Containers     1           0           3.492GB     3.492GB (100%)
Local Volumes  2           2           0B          0B (0%)

$ flatpak list | wc -l
65
$ du -hs /var/lib/flatpak
12G	/var/lib/flatpak

$ df -h
Filesystem             Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/cryptroot  234G   31G  191G  14% /

A 256GB drive is on the smaller side and I’m barely at 14%. Storage is cheap.

I recently brought over some ideas from VanillaOS over to my Arch install.

1. Install as much as possible via flatpak
2. Install a bunch of other stuff in distrobox (with podman backend)

That gives me like 50% (idk fake number) of the features from VanillaOS, but I get to keep control over my system.

Not that I ever had any problems with native pacman installs though… so… not sure how much benefit I’m really getting from doing this. I guess my pacman -Syu command runs faster now. That’s something…

Holy moly, I did not know this existed! Thanks! Just turned this on!

Any resources you’d recommend?

I suspect that it goes down and stays down whenever there is an app update, but I haven’t confirmed it yet.

Does the plain wireguard app stay up during updates?

if the cameras don’t load, open Tailscale and make sure it’s connected

I’ve been using Tailscale for a few months now and this is my only complaint. On Android and macOS, the Tailscale client gets randomly killed. So it’s an extra thing you have to manage.

It’s almost annoying enough to make me want to host my services on the actual internet… almost… but not yet.

Neat. I’ve been getting more curious about WebDAV recently. Also, great website! Thanks for posting!

Yeah, you’re right. Bad advice actually. Oops.

Shortcut: use Tailscale to create your own private network and avoid hosting on the big, bad Internet. Otherwise, you really have to be careful on how you protect your services.

Minor downside (or upside) is that you’ll have to install the Tailscale app on each device you want to make part of the network.

This made hosting at home a lot easier for me.

Update: Ah! I misread the post. Tailscale doesn’t make sense for this use case. My bad! 😅