This has been going on for over a year since I started playing with Linux desktop, across all distros I have tried: Flatpak sucks badly, to the point of being unusable.
RPM, APT, whatever… flies, I can install Krita from RPM in a matter of seconds. Installing a small utility from Flathub can take 10-20 minutes. It crawls at tens of KILOBYTES per second. Every time I’m doing a new Linux install I want to scream in rage.
I’m stuck again… Doing a fresh F43 install and I have been unable to install any Flatpaks for the past hour or so. They just drop to single kilobytes and eventually time out.
There are lots of similar complaints on other forums, on Reddit, on Github and zero answers. Why is this system so freaking terrible? Why is it still around if it doesn’t work? If Flatpaks are the future of Linux then it’s really bad.
I’d love to simply avoid it but I can’t as many apps are only available as Fatpaks which is so unfortunate.
It sometimes picks up randomly, I see couple of MB per second briefly. It crawls all other times.
Might be helpful to share a few more details about your system…what desktop environment, running a vpn? using wifi? Wired connection? Wifi Network adapter type/name?
Do you use a metered internet connection?
What is your connection priority in internet/wifi settings? Note, that this should be set to ‘0’ to get a good connection speed for certain things. A negative number may slow connection there.
I have to say though, I have never experienced this particular problem with Gnome software, KDE Discover, or Bazaar. Have yet to try warehouse but that might be another option for you.
Try again with a Gui package manager and see if that helps or not.
From a bit of googling, it seems that Flathub manages distribution through the Fastly CDN.
Unfortunately I suspect that unlike with the Fedora repos (where, as discussed on your other thread, you can tweak your config to steer you to your preferred mirrors), there’s less that can be done at your end if you’re in a location not well served by Fastly.
Very happy to be corrected if that’s too pessimistic!
No VPN. No WiFi, all wired to 2.5 Gigabit LAN and un-metered 2 gigabit fiber to the world and I have zero other problems. I get close to 2 gigabits from various Linux repositories and from Steam, for example. My Nextcloud is hosted by Hetzner in Germany and I have zero issues. Same with GOG, Digital Ocean, Backblaze, etc. Everything flies.
This happens regardless of what Linux distro I use but I normally use KDE Plasma. This was the same on F41, F42 and now on F43.
It doesn’t matter if I use the command line of GUI Package Manager such as Discover.
Flatpak is persistently slow.
I know they use Fastly CDN so yeah, there are no “mirrors”, there is no way to configure Flatpak locally to use a faster “mirror” the way we can do with DNF or APT. They also close all speed problem complaints on Github as “it’s not us, it’s somebody else” with no attempt to help or explain anything. They ask for logs but if you ask them “which logs?” you get no answers. It’s getting to be extremely frustrating. It just looks like a really bad and poorly managed and poorly supported system.
I don’t know where to look for help. It always ends up with nothing. I’d be happy just not to use it, but it’s not possible.
I was told on Github to take it up with Flathub. I’m really getting tired of this. What a terrible system. I don’t know if it’s worth it. I’d have to open another account, with Flathub. It’s just such a really discouraging experience overall. For a system that is so crucial to the Linux software ecosystem, it’s ridiculous how badly supported or even documented Flatpaks is.
I don’t even know who to complain, where to get help. I’m beginning to think that Canonical had the right idea to distance themselves from Flatpak. Maybe they knew something we don’t? Too bad Snaps suck so badly too.
Thank you for trying to help me again, but this is definitely not something I want to deal with.
Maybe I need to look into the possibility of simply not using Flatpak. Fedora actually may make it easy as Fooyin is available natively from RPM. It’s Flatpak-only on Debian.
FreeFileSync can be also installed natively using a .run file. But others, such as HandBrake are only Flatpaks. But I would need to do a bit more research.
Other options? Warm up to Snaps? Give up trying to switch to Linux and stay on Windows?
I know. I did too. At least twice this year, including today. I and others were told by one of the admins to go away basically as this is not a Flatpak problem
You could try instead of using the GUI, go to the webpage for flat hub and download the packages there and then install them by clicking on them in the downloads folder or where ever you save them. I have found that to be the fastest. Another thing you could try is to use a vpn and try and connect from a different place and see if that does it maybe it is a routing issue for the packages? I dont know.
I really don’t need this. I really don’t need the humiliation of dealing with people like this. How hard would it be for him to tell us what to do, where to go for help? This is Github’s Flatpak repo, isn’t it? At the very least he could show some decency and tell us what to do.
It was such a rough road and I think I need a longer break from Linux and its issues. Windows sucks balls but Linux sucks too. Linux just comes with a different set of annoyances to work around and some are worse than Windows and Windows mostly works fine once the annoyances and crapware are removed. It’s a tradeoff and I’m no longer sure if it’s worth the time and effort.
Thanks to the Fedora team for their work and thanks to the forum members for all the help. I’m gonna log out now and I may come back in a year or so to see if things got any better.
I remember from one of your other threads that you’re using some kind of filtering of traffic coming in from certain countries. Please correct me if I misunderstood things. If it’s true though, then could the issue be related to your setup?
