 Back when I was an Arch user, I was fairly smug about the fact that I never had to use a flat pack or a snap or an app image Everything that I needed was from the AUR and that's because the AUR was and is awesome But now I'm a fedora user and I'm happily a fedora user I think fedora is the best distro for me But the only reason why I don't miss the AUR is because flat pack exists without flat pack I'd be in a lot of trouble because there's a lot of programs that I've had to install that don't exist in the fedora repos but are flat packs So I'm very grateful for flat pack and I've kind of become a flat pack fanboy over the last few months And I really really do like it and I truly believe that it is the best cross-platform package management out there I don't care for snaps. I have had my words with app image We don't need to go in any of those things But flat packs are the ones that I've chosen and I think that are the best that doesn't mean However that I think that they're perfect. I truly do not there are definitely things about flat pack That I think could be improved and some things that just downright do not like So what I thought I would do today is talk about five things you can do to manage your flat pack library Some of these things are absolutely essential. Some of them are just tips and tricks. Some of them are tools So let's go ahead and jump in The absolute first thing you should do when you start using flat packs for the first time is Install flat seal. I'm of the firm belief that flat seal is an application that should come default when flat pack is enabled Some distros are actually starting to do this but not all of them And I think that they all should now you're probably wondering what is flat seal? Well flat seal is an application You're seeing some b-roll of it right now that basically manages the permissions for all of your flat packs And it doesn't matter where your flat packs come from they can come from flat hub or from your distros repose or From some random person on the internet. It doesn't matter. They'll appear in flat seal and you can manage the permissions Now why is this important? It's important because by default flat packs do not have access to a whole host of things on your system and It's like that for a reason. It's supposed to be a containerized system, right? It's supposed to be very secure now The developers of flat pack and the people who package the specific flat packs Can enable some things if a Application needs it. So if your application is like audacity that thing is going to need access to the home directory So it comes with access to the home directory out of the box But not all applications are like that So for example, if you download the discord application from flat pack or from flat hub in this case What you're going to find Is that it does not have access to the home directory Which means that you can't upload pictures from your pictures folder or save pictures to your pictures folder Or any of those things it just does not have access to it. You hit the little plus button in discord And the file picker will come up and you'll have access to nothing but the downloads folder for whatever reason So flat seal will allow you to change those permissions It'll also allow you to give discord and other applications access to your video camera your webcam or your microphone things like that so Flat seal is essential for almost every application in some form or fashion because a lot of those applications need access to certain parts of your system And they can't have that unless you give them permission and you can only give them permission through flat seal That's why I think it's so important Now one of my main criticisms of flat pack is the way you run the programs now for the most part Most people are going to start all of their applications No matter how they're installed including flat pack from their system menu And that's the way I do it too for the most part. I start everything from rofi However, there are some situations where I want to start a flat pack from the terminal And if you've ever done this you'll know that it's not a very good system So in order to do this you have to do something called flat pack run And then the odd name of the flat pack So most of these are like org dot steam dot steam or org dot obs project dot obs or something like that It's very weird and it's not great. Unfortunately. There's not a way to get around the weird naming But there is a way to at least shorten The whole flat pack run part of the command So if you alias flat pack run to something different So just in this case maybe flat pack or fr or something like that whatever happens to be You can skip typing out a portion of that command Now this is not something that a lot of people are going to have to worry about so much But if you do find yourself starting flat packs from the terminal every now and then aliasing at least part of the command can save you some time and that Tip there kind of leads into the next one. The next one is to learn the flat pack dash dash list command Now what this does is it lists all the flat packs that you've installed on your system And the reason why this is important is to first of all it tells you all the flat packs that are on your system And it's good to know what flat packs and applications that you've installed Sometimes you just kind of forget what you've installed flat pack dash dash list is a great way Of figuring out that question. What do you have installed? But it's more important for You to learn what the applications are actually called So if you start flat pack from the terminal or even if you're creating like a key binding and you're in the window manager or In even kde or gnom or something like that You may need to know the actual name of the application And unlike a regular application which you download from a repo which has a class name and all this stuff Oftentimes in order to launch a flat pack from a key binding or from sxh kde or whatever You have to know this exact name in order to find that exact name You have to know the flat pack dash dash list command and that will list out all of the applications that you have installed through flat pack Along with the nickname and the actual name so the or dot obs dot obs studio or whatever happens to be That really weird long name with periods and stuff in it That's what you'll probably end up needing to Use if you're trying to create key bindings or something like that So flat pack dash dash list is a command that I use all the time So the next tip is another one that is going to be used to bypass an inherent flaw that flat pack has And that's theming your flat packs now if you're using a gtk Application that you downloaded from flat pack you'll notice that the theming is all messed up And this is especially bad on window managers and plasma It happens on gunome too, but not nearly as bad So the thing is is that when you download a gtk app from flat pack It doesn't respect your system themes at all. It just does not have access to those things So you can do some fixing of this with flat seal But it's kind of hit or miss really what you're going to need to do is open up terminal The first thing you'll need to do is give it access to your themes directory So the biggest issue I had here was that I could not give it access to my themes directory Which happens to be in user share themes. That's in a root directory. So it only has Privileges for people who have root access Regular flat pack can't save to that because it does not have permission So what I ended up having to do is create a dot themes directory inside my home folder And that allowed me to give it access to That particular themes directory. So in order to give flat packs permission To access your themes directory once you've created your dot themes folder in your home directory What you do is do pseudo flat pack override dash dash file system equal dollar sign home slash dot themes now I'm showing this in b-roll as well right now So just follow those along. I'll also paste the commands down in the video description below So you can just copy and paste them if you want now Like I said, most people aren't going to have that dot themes directory in their home directory They're going to have to create that thing and what you want to do is when you download a gtk Theme put it in that directory So that's going to then apply to anything that uses flat packs You may end up having to put it in both your dot themes directory and in the one in user slash share slash themes You may have to have it in both places in order for this to work But you'll have to do some experimenting there Once you've given access using the override command you can then tell flat pack what theme to use you do this by doing pseudo flat pack override and then dash dash Env equals capital gkk underscore theme all that last part totally capitalized And then equals and then the name of your theme the name of the theme is Probably going to be the name of the directory of the theme It may or may not be that you may end up having to go inside of that directory And see if there's another directory inside of it It's going to be kind of hit or miss and you're going to have to experiment a little bit Personally, this is the worst part about flat pack to me this whole theming thing Because it's so hit or miss sometimes you can get it to work. Sometimes it doesn't work at all So this is the way you do it But unfortunately Like I said, it is hit or miss Hopefully you'll have better luck with it than I have because some a lot of my applications still don't follow this at all So the last Tip that I have for you today is to remember to update your flat packs So a lot of people when they use linux are very prone to Updating their system through the command line and that's the way I do it too I prefer to do that than updating through a software center or something like that But if you do update through the command line, you're probably doing something like sudo pacman dash syu or Or doing sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade or sudo dnf update or whatever you happen to be doing You do those things and you consider your system updated. That's the way it's always been But flat pack doesn't apply here. You have to do flat packs separately. So Just run flat pack update and it'll update all of your flat packs This is a great way of updating your flat packs if you don't want to use a Software center to do it. So if you're outside of genome or you're using kde plasma And you don't want to use discover because discovers crap Whatever your reasoning might be you can use the terminal to update your flat packs And I highly recommend you do it one way or the other Just make sure you remember that unless you're using a software center that updates everything You're probably going to have to do this separately. So you'll update your system and then you'll update your flat packs Those two things are two separate steps So those are the five tips that I have for you today I'm sure there are probably more and I may do a follow-up video to this if you're interested in that Make sure you hit the subscribe button if you have comments on any of this stuff Leave those comments in the comments section below. I'd love to hear from you. 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