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Virtual Box vs Flatpak

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When comparing Virtual Box vs Flatpak, the Slant community recommends Virtual Box for most people. In the question“What are the best FLOSS Sandboxing Apps for Security/Privacy and Daily Usage, Linux?” Virtual Box is ranked 3rd while Flatpak is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Virtual Box is:

It works for Windows, macOS, Linux, BSD, and many others.

Specs

No specs yet!

Default RepositoryFlatHub.org

Initial MaintainerAlex Larsson

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Common Questions

What are the best FLOSS Sandboxing Apps for Security/Privacy and Daily Usage, Linux?

Pros

Pro
Compatible with Many Operating Systems

It works for Windows, macOS, Linux, BSD, and many others.

Pro
Free and open source

Pro
Beginner friendly

A virtual machine can be set up in minutes if a ISO file to load is already available.

Pro
Many free images available

Though most are linux flavors at https://virtualboxes.org/
Oracle's virtualbox site has others.

Pro
Can do snapshots

Pro
Works well and fast for Windows host and Linux guest

Pro
A lot of customization

VirtualBox has multiple virtualization options. Each one may be tailored to the guest operating system’s needs. This makes it especially good on virtualizing older systems, such as DOS, obscure distros, etc.

Pro
Cross-distribution

You can install flatpak packages on any distro you want.

Pro
fast

searching, installing and updating are faster than others in my experience

Pro
Application sandboxing

All applications are limited to a set of predefined permissions, enhancing privacy and security.

Pro
A well-written documentation

Pro
Flexible runtime management

You can install a lot of runtimes for different apps, making applications a lot more compatible while still allowing some applications to share their runtimes.

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Cons

Con
Lacks video performance

Virtualbox has a hard cap of 256MB of video memory. This could make newer operating systems run slower.

Con
Minimal CPU customization

You can only enable/disable certain features. You cannot cap the speed of the CPU, which is required to run systems such as Windows 95.

Con
Bloated

Due to the way Flatpack handles packaging, this can lead to a large cache being created which quickly inflates to unreasonable sizes. Not only this, but using flatpack requires a large chunk of space to be reserved for it's own file hierarchy.