Motivation Opportunity is upon us! For the past few years, the desktop Linux user base has been growing at a historically high rate. StatCounter currently has us at 4.14% desktop OS market share for Q2 2025. For comparison, when Fedora Workstation was first released in Q4 2014, desktop Linux was at 1.38%. Now, StatCounter measures...
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Outdated runtimes aren’t great either, but as they learned with OBS, just updating to the newest version broke a bunch of stuff.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We can flag old runtimes as out of date. Individual users or whole distros can set preferences to anvoid out of date runtimes. But Flathab must support out of date runtimes.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 That way, they would have been using a supported runtime while still using their outdated Qt version until the upstream issues were fixed.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.