The future of Flatpak

"Wick started his talk by saying that it looks like everything is great with the Flatpak project, but if one looks deeper, "you will notice that it's not being actively developed anymore". There are people who maintain the code base and fix security issues, for example, but "bigger changes are not really happening anymore". He said that there are a bunch of merge requests for new features, but no one feels responsible for reviewing them, and that is kind of problematic."

--OOF.

Flatpak top contributor by number of commits works for collabora, so i think it is a matter of just getting funding for work. no need to start an ugly fork. its a question of how badly people want the work to be done.

I wonder how well collabora would do if they started a subscription for regular users that could vote on what issue to work on (and maybe delegate their voting power), the issue that he mention that is "not great" sound like something a lot of people would be interested in fixing. and in general with so much of our lives documented on our computer more security enhancement work could be great.

Reading that Flatpak is struggling to merge new features is concerning. Flatpak is a really important project for getting commercial developers on board. I don't want to go back to unpacking .deb files built only for Ubuntu 12.04 to install an application and I want closed source apps to be sandboxed.

There are closed source apps in Flathub today. Spotify comes to mind.

I use closed source apps. BurpSuite, Microsoft Teams, and some of the JetBrains tools for example.

I would like to see FlatHub become an App Store suitable for distributing paid software as well. That is, I can pay for the software in the App Store. If FlatHub was making money, they could fund the development of Flatpak.

I do not want FlatHub or GNOME to be writing commercial software. They can distribute it though and then use those profits to support the ecosystem.

I use LibreOffice but more people would use Linux if they could use Microsoft Office. I use GIMP but many professional users cite Photoshop as the reason that they cannot migrate to Linux.

Let’s get the Adobe Creative Suite into a Linux Apo Store so Linux users can get their software and Adobe can make money. Then let’s try to make better Open Source alternatives to put them out of business. I would rather compete with them head-to-head on Linux than to keep people trapped on commercial desktops like we do today.

We already have a successful paid software App Store on Linux. It is called Steam. And it is bringing many new users to Linux. We need to do the same for paid applications that are not games.

I do not really want either FlatHub or GNOME to fall into the Mozilla trap though where they become focussed on creating revenue. FlatHub already has a natural way to make money. They should use it to first fund development of their platform. If they have excess cash (guaranteed if an App Store takes off), they can give it away to other projects. Something like a FlatHub Summer of Code would be amazing.

a great, interesting article. thanks.
"Like, you bind something on localhost and suddenly all applications can just poke at it". He gave the example of AusweisApp, which is an official authentication app for German IDs that can be used to authenticate with government web sites. It exposes a service on the local host, which makes it available to all Flatpak applications on the system.

This is some of the stuff that I feel like we really need to take a look at. I'm not sure if this is like directly exploitable, but at the very least it's kind of scary.

Over the years i noticed that germany has ugly software and websites. in austria its different.

Another awkward spot the project finds itself in, he said, is with NVIDIA drivers. The project has to build multiple versions of NVIDIA drivers for multiple runtimes that are supported, and that translates to a great deal of network overhead for users who have to download each of those versions—even if they don't need all of the drivers. (This complaint on the Linux Mint forum illustrates the problem nicely.)

obligatory NVIDIA, FUCK YOU!

How long do you think until Flatpak is replacing packages? I really don't like the current stultifying trend of the combination of Flatpak and immutability.

Why?
- not op but here's my reasons: I want my apps to be able to talk to each other. So flatpak is just in the way. Also, I don't see the point of immutable distros. I could boot off of btrfs snapshots years ago. Immutability gives me absolutely nothing of value either
I do not want Flatpak to replace distro packages.

I use both pacman and apk and they are both far better package managers than Flatpak is. Apk 3 is awesome. And I do not want sandboxes for native packages.

The role of Flatpak is as a distribution method for app developers to target Linux as a platform with a single build. It is a place to get things that may not be in my distro repos. It can be a method for commercial distribution. It is the cure for the “fragmentation” problem that makes it difficult to develop software for Linux.

I hate snaps but snaps could actually be used to replace packages. You could distribute GCC as a snap. In its current form, Flatpak is only targeting GUI applications
As someone new to both, I'm commenting to hear your answer to the other person's "why?" :)
- As the person in question has remained silent, I do wonder if I could perhaps help out instead. Would you be so kind to vocalize your question(s) as elaborate as possible? Afterwards, I'll try to answer them to the best of my abilities.
It isn't replacing packages. App developers are simply spending there time where it matters.

If a distro wants to package something they can still do it.
I don't think it works well enough yet.

The future of Flatpak - LWN