Background-Story: I did a “flatpak update” on a remote client and every package wants the PW for downloading and for installing again. I had to enter the password like 30 times or more.
Flatpak is so bad for single-source-of-truth for install state that you should have to put in your password every time just to confirm you understand the pain you’re signing up for.
My only advice here would be if they can change the prompt to say
<span style="color:#323232;">THANK YOU SIR! MAY I HAVE ANOTHER!
</span><span style="color:#323232;">password: *******
</span>
Really weird thing is, distros and flathub kinda pushes users to do system wide installs while most of the packages can work and get updated per user. They are pushing the thing which made Windows almost impossible to use without an administrator user. A dramatic example would be gnu guix, almost never requires root for updates or installs. It is also usable by normal users. From GNU… :-)
I update flatpak through ssh and haven’t had this issue. I think you installed it system wide and not for the user, since with user you don’t need password at all
E: From the comments it looks like they didn’t use sudo to update either. With it it would’ve asked once. With --user that wouldn’t have been necessary ofc.
It sounds like you’re trying to update system-wide flatpak packages as non-root. Most distros use polkit to allow you to update those without a password from the desktop (i.e. a local user), but usually require a password for remote users (like ssh). Just run as root: “sudo flatpak update”.
You could also migrate to a user flatpak installation instead a system-wide one. That’s what I’ve done. IMO that’s how it should be done, but that’s not the default on most distros for some reason.
Because he tried to update a system-wide flatpak install as a non-root user. Flatpak uses polkit for root permissions. Polkit is usually set up to allow non-root local users to update flatpak without a password, but not remote ones, hence having to continually enter the password for polit when using SSH. He could just run the update with sudo like a normal package manager and would only have to enter the password once. But then he wouldn’t be able to complain on Lemmy.
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