xdg-desktop-portal VS flatpak

Compare xdg-desktop-portal vs flatpak and see what are their differences.

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xdg-desktop-portal flatpak
154 431
524 4,049
3.8% 1.4%
9.4 9.0
4 days ago about 18 hours ago
C C
GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 only GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 only
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

xdg-desktop-portal

Posts with mentions or reviews of xdg-desktop-portal. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-29.
  • Flathub: One million active users and growing
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Jan 2024
  • Changes to xdg.portals?
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 28 Nov 2023
  • PCSX2 Disables Wayland Support
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Nov 2023
    >Not losing all the work every time your windows manager crashes

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509703

    >remapping keys

    >Use xinput to change parameters of their input devices (libinput dropped most configuration options present with evdev)

    Up to the compositor.

    >Global shortcuts

    Also up to the compositor. Was added to xdp in https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/blob/main/data... so it's up to the compositor's xdp impl to provide it. It was created by a KDE dev so I assume KDE implements it at least.

    >tunnelling over ssh

    https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe

  • Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Oct 2023
    > - O proper screen recording support

    Works just fine. I use OBS.

    > - broken screen sharing

    Never had any trouble with it.

    > - No proper global keyboard shortcut

    > - No push to talk support

    On its way: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/pull/711 / https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/#gdbus-org.free...

    > - Several problems with multiple screens

    Haven't had any more than on X11, but then again I do use Nvidia hardware on Linux.

  • The Guy Preserving the New History of PC Games, One Linux Port at a Time
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Sep 2023
    It might help, but at this point Linux containers can't really stabilize the whole environment, especially for games. Particular pain points include accelerated graphics (which theoretically can have a stable kernel interface, but in practice is so complex and performance-sensitive that it's not stable enough to be a "reference platform", so to speak) and modern game controllers (which present a whole mess of concerns typically "addressed" in Flatpak by granting the device=all permission and hoping for the best [1]).

    I also know a guy who ran into issues with a kernel update breaking a custom allocator, although I don't know the fine details. That wasn't for a game, but games also use custom allocators for various reasons.

    [1] https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/issues/536

  • Unpacking Elixir: Syntax
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Sep 2023
    I don't use Wayland, but it seems xdg-desktop-portal since 1.16.0 has a 'Global Shortcuts portal'. Perhaps check it out.

    https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal

  • UX Hurdles in Open Source #1: Flatpak Permissions
    1 project | /r/linux | 27 Jun 2023
    It's being discussed: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/issues/611
  • Advice: TW or Aeon
    2 projects | /r/openSUSE | 26 Jun 2023
    The first bug report was filed in early 2022 but unfortunately no progress yet on the matter, even after numerous similar reports ever since.
  • Native messaging for Firefox
    1 project | /r/flatpak | 23 Jun 2023
  • Xdg portal hyprland and launching gui apps
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 21 Jun 2023
    Yeah been having the same issue since I changed to using the unstable branch, supposedly noticed and fixed upstream for a few variants of the problem (different people with different configurations of DE and xdg-* deps installed report the same issue due to timeouts of the other portals)

flatpak

Posts with mentions or reviews of flatpak. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-27.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing xdg-desktop-portal and flatpak you can also consider the following projects:

gamescope - SteamOS session compositing window manager [Moved to: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope]

steam-runtime - A runtime environment for Steam applications

wayfire - A modular and extensible wayland compositor

firejail - Linux namespaces and seccomp-bpf sandbox

gtk-layer-shell - A library to create panels and other desktop components for Wayland using the Layer Shell protocol

Autodesk-Fusion-360-for-Linux - This is a project, where I give you a way to use Autodesk Fusion 360 on Linux!

pipewire - Mirror of the PipeWire repository (see https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/)

distrobox - Use any linux distribution inside your terminal. Enable both backward and forward compatibility with software and freedom to use whatever distribution you’re more comfortable with. Mirror available at: https://gitlab.com/89luca89/distrobox

flatpaks

nix-gui - Use NixOS Without Coding

us.zoom.Zoom

com.valvesoftware.Steam