Applications using Flatpak need permissions to access resources such as
Bluetooth, sound (with
PipeWire),
network, and
files. These permissions are configured by the maintainer of the Flatpak and can be added or removed by users on their system. Another key feature of Flatpak allows application developers to directly provide updates to users without going through
Linux distributions, and without having to package and test the application separately for each distribution. Because Flatpak runs in a sandbox, which provides a separate,
ABI-stable version of common system libraries, it uses more space on the system than common native packages. However,
OSTree, a technology underlying Flatpak,
deduplicates matching files. This means that the first few Flatpak installations will occupy more space, but as more packages are added, the system will use space more efficiently. ==Flathub==