A statement concerning the Fedora and Flathub relationship from the FPL

I don't like this. Flatpaks are a huge step forward, but Fedora Flatpaks are two steps back. I'm not at all convinced by his arguments here or in the rejected proposal.

The only potential benefit that might make sense is that they will contain the same Fedora-specific patches found in the fedora RPMs... Except that is exactly the type of thing Flatpaks were supposed to prevent! Neither users nor developers want a middle man adding or removing features for their software. It has historically been one of the biggest pain points for migrating to Linux as a user, or supporting it as a developer. It was necessary in the past for compatibility reasons, but Flatpaks fixed that. Now, developers can publish one Flatpak that will work on all distros, and users don't have to wonder if they'll be able to use some app or not, or whether it will work... Unless they're on Fedora

But I don't like this post nor the wording in the proposal. He doesn't actually outline why he wants this to go through. I'm not claiming any tinfoil hat conspiracy behind the scenes, it's just his argument is not well articulated. If someone wants to use an app with Fedora-specific patches for some reason, they can layer the RPM on top of their Atomic distro. There's no reason to add uncertainty and confuse users by turning those into flatpaks.

1 comments

I don't like this. Flatpaks are a huge step forward, but Fedora Flatpaks are two steps back. I'm not at all convinced by his arguments here or in the rejected proposal.
The only potential benefit that might make sense is that they will contain the same Fedora-specific patches found in the fedora RPMs... Except that is exactly the type of thing Flatpaks were supposed to prevent! Neither users nor developers want a middle man adding or removing features for their software. It has historically been one of the biggest pain points for migrating to Linux as a user, or supporting it as a developer. It was necessary in the past for compatibility reasons, but Flatpaks fixed that. Now, developers can publish one Flatpak that will work on all distros, and users don't have to wonder if they'll be able to use some app or not, or whether it will work... Unless they're on Fedora
But I don't like this post nor the wording in the proposal. He doesn't actually outline why he wants this to go through. I'm not claiming any tinfoil hat conspiracy behind the scenes, it's just his argument is not well articulated. If someone wants to use an app with Fedora-specific patches for some reason, they can layer the RPM on top of their Atomic distro. There's no reason to add uncertainty and confuse users by turning those into flatpaks.