I did notice that sometimes the flatpack version of a program didn’t seem to recognise my graphic card. I’ve seen this first with Handbrake, but also with other apps it seems that i get better performance with the mint package or the official ppa. Did anyone notice anything similar?
I’m using Mint on an old HP laptop with a nvidia card so if anything I’m glad that everything is recognised properly (safeboot disabled).
Well, that’s one thing with Flatpak. There is a permission system, as the applications are fully or partially sandboxed. You can install “Flatseal”, that can change permission for each installed Flatpak application. But it can be confusing or hard to understand what you have to change in order to make it work. Or maybe the application itself is not packaged correctly as a Flatpak, I don’t know.
Yeah it can be confusing; Flatseal makes it easier as it’s a GUI way of doing what is otherwise command line with flatpak itself but it still assumes some knowledge about what you’re doing and can be a bit of trial and error. The more you expose to the sandbox, the more “native” performance you can achieve but it’s at the expense of security.
In Flatseal you can set global options for all apps, or individual apps. For graphics, in the Device section, toggling the option to make the GPU available to the sandboxes may be needed - “GPU Acceleration” in the Device section. That one option can be pretty effective as GPU hardware acceleration is often important, if not essential, for programs like Handbrake (which are video transcoding).
This is equivalent to “device=dri” when launching the flatpak via the commandline.