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- cross-posted to:
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I used to always remove Fedora Flatpaks, but I’ve grown to like them.
They are built from Fedora RPMs, so follow Fedora’s packaging and building guidelines. Meanwhile Flathub and snap are the wild west of packaging; many flatpaks/snaps are just repackagings of existing packages, which are often built against ancient glibc and libraries for broad compatibility for traditional packages.
They use libraries that are in Fedora’s repos. So any vendored dependencies in a Fedora Flatpak will get automatically updated once the app is rebuilt. Meanwhile on Flathub/snap, those vendored dependencies need to be manually updated (though there are tools/bots for Flathub that automatically check for updates and can even create merge requests). Upstream app developers may not upgrade their apps in a timely fashion.
I also much prefer how Fedora handles runtimes. I only have two Fedora runtimes on my system, Fedora Platform and Fedora KDE 6 Platform, which are both based on Fedora 41. Meanwhile on Flathub, I have 52 runtimes installed. Thankfully most of these are small, but there are still quite a few larges ones. Multiple versions of mesa, multiple versions of Qt, multiple versions of the Freedesktop runtime.
By far the biggest disadvantage is that they’re affected by Fedora’s copyright/patent restrictions. So most multimedia apps I end up installing from Flathub so I have working codecs. But there is some work being done that would allow Fedora Flatpaks utilize ffmpeg-full from Flathub.
There’s downsides too. Such as the bottles debacle with how RPM maintainers package software that sometimes left his apps outdated or broken.
I’m in the boat that Fedora packages might be better than a random user who abandons their repack later, but flatpaks from the original Devs is ideal :)
Weren’t there talks about removing the Fedora flatpaks entirely in favor of a regular Flathub access?
There’s always talk about that (see alternative 2), but that could block packaging core apps as Flatpaks.
I wonder if selectively mirroring flathub is an option. The point of the fedora flatpak repo is to only have open source applications isn’t it?
Centralising around Flathub seems to me like it defeats the point of flatpak being able to have multiple repositories.
I think that besides unverified packages, lack of repositories (for example, for FOSS only) is the main problem of Flatpak rn
There’s a priority mechanism in Fedora/flatpak but when I tried to give priority to flathub it was ignored.
Maybe it works now.
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You will, when need arise :)
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They get better everyday. You will use them at some point if you cannot find your software via your favorite package manager.
What kind of problems did you experience? I’m on an admittedly flatpak first distro and I can’t remember ever having issues.
