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didn’t read the article, but i never got the point of having a distro-specific flathub repo. isn’t being distro-agnostic the main thing about flatpaks?
Not distro specific. They are Flatpaks built according to Fedora’s philosophy. But you can use them anywhere. I’ve used them on Ubuntu and OpenSUSE.
It’s about making sure you know what is inside the flatpaks. If you make your own set of flatpaks, you can distribute them with the OS. It’s not that fedora flatpaks aren’t distro-agnostic, you can use them on any distro. They just want a set where they can verify the build process and trust.
Why only Fedora?
That “article” is painful to try and read, it’s like a run on thought that bounces all over the place. The author really should make a clear outline and could probably cut out half by not saying the same thing over and over and over again. I stopped after the third time I read about Fedora flatpaks are different from flathub flatpaks, and users like flathub more, but the author is apparently eventually going to explain why that’s an issue after 2K words of nonsense.
It’s great they’re having this discussion, but some of the arguments seem overblown and imply Flathub does less reviewing of app than actually does.
Outdated runtimes aren’t great either, but as they learned with OBS, just updating to the newest version broke a bunch of stuff.
See this blog post for a response that was made to similar criticisms during the OBS issue. Flathub Safety: A Layered Approach from Source to User
We can flag old runtimes as out of date. Individual users or whole distros can set preferences to anvoid out of date runtimes. But Flathab must support out of date runtimes.
If an app has not been updated, I want it to continue running.
I want FlatHub to support binary only apps (like commercial ones) as well.
FlatHub is supposed to be the easy, one-stop place to publish apps. If I cannot put my app there, it is a problem.
It is supposed to be the place I get apps that will run on my distro. If the app I use daily that has not been updated in 10 years stops working, I am annoyed.
Fedora wants to deprecate runtimes that would still be “stable” on Debian.
What OBS did was bad. They should not have stuck to an EOL runtime, period. It would have been better if they temporarily moved to a supported freedesktop runtime and vendored in their Qt dependencies. That way, they would have been using a supported runtime while still using their outdated Qt version until the upstream issues were fixed.
What they did was bad but I am glad the Flatpak kept working.
Uhm, isn’t bazzite practically what the author is asking for?
Bazzite is popular precisely because we ignore bad opinions such as these. Flathub is mainstream and all the whinging in the world isn’t going to change that.
Not at all.
- Bazzite preinstalls Flathub apps by default. The author still wants to use Fedora Flatpaks for the preinstalled apps.
- Bazzite ships Flathub unfiltered. The author wants to only show FLOSS software built on trusted platforms by default (so no taking a precompiled binary and shipping that).
- Bazzite ships Flathub in spite of its flaws. The author wants Fedora to work with Flathub to clean up its issues before shipping the remote by default.
Bazzite ships Flathub unfiltered.
Last update (which replaced Discover with Bazaar) changed that.
so no taking a precompiled binary and shipping that.
All FLOSS apps on Flathub are built on trusted platforms by default, in the open and verifiable. Same thing with Brew.
Not including proprietary software in the default config is a valid choice every distro has to make.
The sudden success of Bazzite comes from how easy it is to use.
I wish they didn’t need to replace Discover and were able to integrate changes into it upstream instead of implementing Bazaar. I’m sure they had their reasons though.
No it’s still unfiltered, we just removed 3 footguns that are pre-installed in the image anyway.
Last update (which replaced Discover with Bazaar) changed that.
In a way, true. But I don’t think they are using flatpak’s filter mechanism. I believe the filtering is done by Bazaar itself. That means that even if Bazaar is hiding an app, you are still able to install it manually from the CLI.
The intent is also different. Bazaar is filtering out footguns, like the Steam flatpak on Bazzite (since Steam is preinstalled as an RPM) and Bluefin hides flatpak IDEs.
All FLOSS apps on Flathub are built on trusted platforms by default, in the open and verifiable.
That’s not true. Take LocalSend as an example. It does not build LocalSend on Flathub. It simply takes a GitHub release URL of a compiled tar.gz. And GitHub releases do not have to be built on GitHub, you are able to upload any local file and have it shown as a release.
The sudden success of Bazzite comes from how easy it is to use.
I agree. But it’s also important to have principles and to stick to them. The great thing about Fedora Atomic is that Fedora is able to create their FLOSS OS following their principles and others are able to take that base and build upon it to create their vision.
Fedora doesn’t have to be for everyone.
That’s certainly part of the motivation (see the 4th paragraph).
Yes, image based. No, not Bazzite specifically, but silverblue (and kinoite) under the fedora banner directly.
But that’s not really the point of the article. In order for those to go mainstream, flatpak and especially flathub have a lot of maturing to do first, and the author lays out a pretty good roadmap with thorough explanations.
They’re already mainstream, any belief otherwise is ridiculous to the point of being parody.
Meanwhile you have Fedora getting legal threats because they’re shipping broken software in their own flatpak repo that exists only to waste developer time and project resources at the expense of its users and their experience.
There are broken Flatpaks in Flathub too. Does Flathub deserve legal threats too? No.
I’d love to think so too, but I think our echo chamber is pretty tight.
I certainly think they’re ready for mainstream usage (I have one Bazzite install myself), but I don’t think there’s significant awareness beyond the dedicated fan base.
There aren’t really any actually useful metrics that I know of, but the only one of the 3 I’ve mentioned that broke into distrowatch’s top 100 is Bazzite, and that’s only in the last few months.
And for legal threats: I doubt any court in any country will give credence to that. Fedora is MIT licensed.
The legal threats were credible and resulted in yet more wasted developer time removing that package instead of the entire useless repo.
You’re forgetting that millions of Steam Deck consoles have been sold and all of them are flathub exclusive.
On top of that you have: Mint, Vanilla OS, Endless OS, OpenMandriva, PopOS!, Clear Linux, PureOS, ZorinOS, KDE Neon, GNOME OS, Salix, and many others all shipping flathub by default.
Fedora is in a very exclusive group of distros dumb enough to ship their own flatpak repo.
Bringing up Distrowatch stats and “Echo chamber” in the same comment is the most absurd thing I’ve seen this year.
I think he was referring to immutable distros not being mainstream, not flatpaks.
That’s kind of what the ublue project is doing. Bazzite is a part of that, of course. But it also has more “normal” versions like Bluefin (gnome) and Aurora (plasma).
