So many flatpaks do this incorrectly though. For Browser by default saves in the flatpaks home/Downloads directory (which is 15 layers deep from ~). You just gotta know to navigate up.
Signal let's you save attachments anywhere on disk, but only if you manually navigate to ~/Downloads, does it actually save (in a way visible and accessible outside of the app). You just gotta know.
I forgot what exactly the problem was with Vscode(/ium), but it also has a catch like that. You just gotta know.
Flatpak turns out to be the best compromise between distribution and cross distro compatibility, but there's still some low hanging fruit that could be improved.
Re:Flatpak Is Not the Future
by jhaygood86 on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @09:06PM
(#29326228)
The apps that are "broken" are apps that are not "Flatpak native", so assume they have full write access to ~
Flatpak aware apps (like the ones I develop, or any on elementary OS since flatpak is the native packaging format there) tend to just work.
It's not true they assume full write access to ~, they just don't propagate they limitation of a constricted choise of paths in their GUIs. Because they isn't a way to do that, GUI toolkits don't really provide a way to clearly communicate you can only save/open in a specific dir.
The filesystem permissions are a bit more fine-grained than "all of home or nothing". Your two examples are already possible to achieve by granting filesystem access to xdg-documents or xdg-downloads.