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...
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.
sounds weird to me. aren’t we replicating the repository problem if each distro decides to make a flatpak repo according to their own philosophies?
Yes, we are. It’s exactly why it shouldn’t be done and why Fedora is the only project wasting their time with this.
Depends what you mean by “problem”. The biggest problem with traditional packages like debs and rpms is that compatibility sucks. They only reliably run on the distro and version they are designed for. Third party packages typically build on old dependencies and hope that backwards compatibility will allow them to run without issue on later distro versions.
Yes, it’s redundant to have have the same app packaged as flatpaks. Though I don’t think that redundancy is necessarily a bad thing. Flathub is not a profitable project and has up to this point relied on Gnome for funding. There’s work being done to spin it out to be it’s own thing and hopefully be supported by paid apps. But what if that fails and it shuts down? Or less dramatically, what if Flathub has a major outage?
One of the common complaints against snap is that there is only one store, controlled by Canonical. Flatpak is designed to support multiple stores. I don’t see why they can’t exist side by side. That’s exactly what I do. I have dozens of apps installed from each source.
And to address the claim of what if “each distro decides to make a flatpak repo according to their own philosophies?”. I guess that would depend on how many resources are being poured into supporting that. If flatpak continues to push for OCI support, then that would make it easier for distros to have their own remotes, if they desire. If not, they can just use an existing option. Whether that be Flathub or Fedora. Personally, I think Fedora Flatpaks are a good match for Debian and OpenSUSE’s policies, only real downside is that major Gnome app updates would be a month delayed, annoying Tumbleweed users.
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.
then why not just use regular packages?
I think, because of Fedoras atomic desktops. I didn’t use any of them yet, but it seems like Flatpaks should be used there, since one should (or can?) not install tradional packages there. Therefore Fedora provides the flatpaks anyway and they can be used on the non atomic desktops as well.
Another reason is, that you might not be able to install the latest version of an application as rpm package if a required dependency in the repo is outdated. A Flatpak usually does not have the issue since a newer version would include the fitting runtime. This said, I do think its not this big of an issue for fedora which is usually quite up to date. But if you run a distribution with LTS releases or something like Debian you will much more likely have older dependencies in your repositiry.
Indeed. I believe most users will just switch to flathub. Sort of how most users will install some codecs, but it can’t legally be included in the base install.