Be aware librewolf and all firefox based browser have security issues with flatpak because flatpak by forcing seccomp filtering breaks the internal sandbox of the browser:

https://librewolf.net/installation/linux/#security

Not to mention the librewolf flatpak is literary the portable tarball they release that works on your distro already, in other words it is the worst way possible to use librewolf.

And you only get that “ease of use” of being able to install it in the software store with one click because your distro did the pain of installing and configuring flatpak for you, otherwise it would have been much worse than what you posted.

Anyways, try using appman instead:

wget -q https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ivan-hc/AM/main/AM-INSTALLER && chmod a+x ./AM-INSTALLER && ./AM-INSTALLER

And then: appman -i librewolf which will “install” the AppImage and you can also sandbox it with am --sandbox librewolf and this sandbox does not break the internal sandbox of the browser unlike flatpak.

and through deduplication between different runtimes and runtime versions. There’s usually very little bloat, if any, especially if you use Flatpaks a lot,

~20 different GUI applications, flatpak ended up using 14 GiB of storage while the appimage equivalent used 3.2 GIB.

And note I was not able to find flatpaks for ghostty, goverlay, kdeconnect and a few other apps, meaning the actual bloat of flatpak is even higher.

Edit: And this is even worse if you are an nvidia user, flatpak will download the entire nvidia driver as well.

Unfortunately because PopOS is based on debian/ubuntu, they tend to split packages into a million pieces, so something that would have a simple pacman -Syu mesa vulkan-radeon on archlinux to get the video drivers is like 6 different packages on debian which I don’t know the names of.

Fedora is the testing ground of red hat, they are known for pushing a lot of breaking changes constantly, even more than Archlinux or other rolling release distros. A while back they pulled this nonsense that we had to deal with that not even upstream approves of.

So my only distro recommendation is archlinux or some archlinux fork, every time I have had to help people with distro issues they all eventually ended up in arch because all other distros have some weird issue that’s a deal breaker. Just don’t rely too much on the Aur.

My other suggestion is that you get most of your software as appimage thru AM: https://github.com/ivan-hc/AM

We ship Steam as an AppImage with a lot of common fixes that affect the flatpak version or native versions of steam (you can check them in the readme), and you don’t have to deal with the hassle of setting up the 32bit repo and installing Steam for example.

Thank you, it seems every way I go i make the wrong choice lol

Welcome to linux.

What you were told about appimage depending on legacy stuff is also not true, it is the libfuse2 dependency, which hasn’t been a dependency of AppImage for 3 years (though some projects haven’t updated yet).

It also isn’t a big deal if you run into an appimage that still depends on it, archlinux which is a rolling release distro, some of its packages like mtpfs and ntfs-3g still depend on libfuse2 as well. And you can still run the AppImage by setting the env variable APPIMAGE_EXTRACT_AND_RUN=1 to avoid having to install libfuse2 in those cases.

Do not use flatpak for firefox based browsers because it breaks it namespaces sandbox.

Firefox releases a portable binary that self updates.

Xfce is on GTK3 and there are no plans to migrate to GTK4.