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?
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not be able to install the latest version of an application as rpm package if a required dependency in the repo is outdated.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.
i guess it makes sense in that case, but i’m really not convinced flatpaks should be used as the default (or only, apparently) way to install every application in the system. flatpak’s flexibility is great for the particular cases where you want to install newer versions of applications or if an application isn’t available in the official repos somehow. besides that, just use distro packages
doesn’t flathub solve that already?
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.
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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?
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i don’t have an issue with multiple flatpak repos. i’d actually find it very interesting if we went a more decentralized route with flatpak (maybe kde, gnome, mozzila would each have their own repos). but i don’t see the point of a distro-specific flatpak when we already have normal packages. compatibility is kind of a non-issue, since you’re not supposed to install them elsewhere anyway (unlike flatpaks)
also, i see absolutely no reason to use fedora’s flatpak repo on debian given that flathub exists already. you could add it if you want it, but what’s the point?
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that makes a little more sense, though debian is not as strict as fedora about propietary software (it is in the separate
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Yes, we are. It’s exactly why it shouldn’t be done and why Fedora is the only project wasting their time with this.