Flatpak vs apt on the Desktop: Where I've Landed After a Month
A month into daily driving Linux Mint: the practical reality of mixing Flatpak and apt, where each earns its place, and where the trade-offs actually bite.
DevOps & Cloud Infrastructure Engineer based in Leeds. I build Azure infrastructure, CI/CD tooling, and shared platform systems for large-scale SaaS. I write about that here, along with personal computing, my ongoing Linux journey, and whatever else is on my mind.
A month into daily driving Linux Mint: the practical reality of mixing Flatpak and apt, where each earns its place, and where the trade-offs actually bite.
A month in, this is what running Steam games via Proton on Linux Mint actually looks like: what works, what doesn't, and whether the trade-off is worth it.
display-profiles is now open source: a generic display-switching tool with named profiles, a setup wizard, and DE plugin support built out of a personal Nvidia driver workaround.
On the quiet, accumulated cost of code-switching, being talked over, and having your confidence read differently depending on your gender in engineering workplaces.
On using Claude Code, Devin, and Copilot in a real engineering workflow: where they help, where they don't, and what the augmentation-vs-replacement framing gets wrong.
Snapshotting Cinnamon panel configurations with dconf and restoring them automatically when switching between single and dual monitor setups.
Using Barrier KVM to share one keyboard and mouse across my personal PC and work laptop, and scripting around an Nvidia display bug that kept resetting monitor settings.
How I installed Linux Mint alongside Windows using disk partitioning, no USB drive needed, and why I haven't touched Windows since.
How we built a shared Terraform module library to manage infrastructure consistency across 500+ repos at The Access Group.