The comments over there (so far) are by people who don’t understand Fedora nor flatpaks, it seems.
But this gives Fedora as a whole bad PR. We need to do and communicate our flatkaks right.
So this basically pulls the runtime information from flathub and uses it for the Fedora build?
Just trying to understand what’s being discussed.
Thanks.
Yes. I believe it also copies the permissions.
Or, maybe, how about playing nice with everyone else and just drop Fedora flatpaks? Fedora is the only distro that’s feeling the need to be different.
If you like Flathub, that’s fine. I like Flathub too.
But I don’t get why people so badly want to centralize everything around Flathub.
- Flathub is unprofitable. What if one day it shut downs?
- What if Flathub has a major outage? Where you going to gets apps from then?
- And as much as I hate this word, what if Flathub enshittifies?
I’m glad Fedora Flatpaks exists if for no other reason than it’s another option. One that aligned with my ideals too (FOSS, higher regard for security, etc). It’s certainly not perfect, but my overall experience has been good and issues I experienced and reported have been addressed in a relatively short amount of time.
I don’t think Fedora should compromise on its ideals (security/philosophical) because people pressure them into doing so. At the very least, I would like to see some big security improvements (no EOL runtimes, more rules for vendored dependencies) from Flathub before it becomes “default”. But I have my doubts those improvements will happen. Flathub needs to be easy with little maintenance for proprietary companies to buy-in.
Fedora is unprofitable. What if one day it shuts down?
And as much as I hate this word, what if Fedora enshittifies?
Because Fedora flatpaks are pointless waste of everyone’s time. They don’t serve any function beyond annoying everyone else.
Fedora flatpaks use virtually the same permissions as Flathub flatpaks do. It’s a false dichotomy.
Great! If it was Flathub you probably wouldn’t have those problems. I have a lot of example where Fedora flatpaks broke while Flathub flatpaks were fine, recent Thunderbird breakage is a sweet example to that.
Nobody asked them to do that.
Go to Flathub and try to fix those issues then. I fail to see how some substandard remote is supposed to be a solution. Even Canonical with their Snaps is playing much better with everyone else than Fedora project here.
And yet it didn’t stop them from having hard rules 
openSUSE still does RPM
The Mastodon post, however, comes from a GNOME contributor/foundation member, which makes the below proposal all the more important.
Which is why I am advocating for decentrailization, not centralization around Flathub or Fedora.
If Fedora shuts down, I’m off to another distro.
Somewhat related, but since Gnome contributors are such a large proponent of Flathub, often saying “just contribute back to Flathub!!!”, I would just like to ask why they are making their own distro. Why don’t they contribute to Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Alpine instead?
I’m not talking about permissions here. I’m talking about things like runtimes and bundled dependencies.
For the most part, Flathub allows apps to use end-of-life runtimes and vendored dependencies.
I get there are some practical reasons for this. In the OBS case, it was because Qt had regressions in the newer version. Understandable, but OBS could have gone about this is a better way, such as updating to a new runtime but bundling the older Qt dependency.
Believe it or not, but I’ve had problems with Flathub too. And I reported those issues too because I want Flathub to succeed too.
GNOME is not making their own distro, this is false narrative.
GNOME OS exists for GNOME developers to have a place to work on GNOME where nothing has been modified or removed by a downstream. That’s it. It has no aspirations of being used by end users in anything other than a testing capacity.
Full agreement here. People often speak ill of Canonical due to them being the only adopter of Snap, but Snap shares things like portals with the flatpak project. The simple truth is that Canonical has contributed far more to flatpak as a technology than Fedora has, and Fedora Flatpaks are actively damaging flatpak’s reputation among the Linux community and making the out-of-box experience of Fedora as painful as possible.
There’s a very good reason the team behind Fedora Atomic has asked multiple times to be freed from Fedora Flatpak.
I’m thinking GNOME has future greater ambitions in-mind (they did create an OS presumably because nobody else offered their needs, and what better way to make sure users get the best of GNOME than to offer it direct? they aren’t competing against anyone)
That used to be the idea of Gnome OS. But over the past year, work has been done to transform Gnome OS into a distro for end users, see: A Desktop for All – Adrian's blog
As a reminder, these are all my opinions. I don’t speak for anyone else in the community, nor do I speak for the Foundation.
Glazed through the post, here what i think.
- We should credit flathub if we use it as a source
- i thought the “Fedora Flatpaks“ thing is using fedoras rpms
But also, these are optional. kinda overblown topic.
i use the Flathub and removed the fedora flatpaks since the other distros probably use flathub too and bugreports are more diverse.
I personally am neutral to Fedoras Flatpaks as i am to KDE or Spin versions. - Its good to have an alternative but some directive is nice.
Fedora Flatpaks do use Fedora RPMs. This tool scrapes some information from Flathub that can be shared, such as which permissions are granted and the equivalent Fedora runtime to use.
Is that necessary? No, but it can save some work of trial and error of trying to get the right permssions.
we should make sure to credit them
also technically we use source without licence, in this case the manifests.
flatpak in general is flawed. sandboxing is still a techdemo for me since i need to install an app to change permissions instead of being asked for anything before.
I use Flatpak because there is software that is not in fedora.
How about supporting Flathub, so this day won’t come?
GNOME OS is first and foremost a testing platform. There is a movement to make it more general-purpose, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still a testing distro.
Of course, GNOME OS could be based on other distro, but as seen with KDE Neon, that’s not necessarily a good idea.
Fedora flatpaks have a priority in Software/Discover. Meaning, some badly packaged Fedora flatpak is listed first, instead of official Flathub package!
Amount of shade thrown at Flathub by Fedora project makes this whole situation even more so infuriating.
I don’t even care about Fedora flatpaks in itself, they can exists in the corner for those who really really want them, but as a default for distro (and rhetoric wrt Flathub!) is purely bizarre.