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.

I think Red Hat should really be stepping up more here, especially since with RHEL 10 they stopped maintaining a ton of desktop packages with the advice for users of those packages being "get the package from Flathub instead of from us" (see https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_... , search for Flathub). If that's Red Hat's attitude towards desktop software, they should be providing the resources to make Flatpak a viable alternative.

> A user's Linux distribution may still be providing an older version of Flatpak that does not have support for --device=input, or whatever new feature that a Flatpak developer may wish to use. Wick said there needs to be a way for applications to use the new permissions by default, but fall back to the older permission models if used on a system with an older version of Flatpak.

I'm glad he brought that up as a problem. I maintain a game on Flathub that has audio and controller support. Because of the limited permissions granularity, that means that the game is displayed as requiring arbitrary device access (--device=input is too new, so the Flathub maintainers don't allow it in packages yet) and being able to listen to your device's microphone (the audio permission doesn't allow only accessing speakers but not microphones). I hope that Flatpak adds backwards compatibility for permissions so newer Flatpak versions can start having more granular permissions.

Red Hat has since walked some of this back. Firefox and Thunderbird were supposed to go Flatpak only for RHEL 10, but they eventually shipped rpms for GA.

Seems there were a myriad of causes for this including lack of Native Messaging, no ability to deploy policies centrally, and broken integrations with various other parts of the desktop ecosystem.

They walked back Firefox and Thunderbird, but Evolution, LibreOffice, GIMP, Inkscape, and Totem have all been dropped. Red Hat no longer packages an office suite, a raster image editor, a vector image editor, or a media player for RHEL. This means that even people using RHEL as a development workstation or something will have to download software from Flathub if they don't want to use a second computer for all their general office tasks.

Given the target of RHEL, I can’t say that I disagree with their decision to not package those applications for RHEL 10. RHEL isn’t really designed to be a user desktop. Ever since RH split out workstation and server versions of the OS, RHEL has always been targeted for servers. I don’t think the lack of an office suite will really be that impactful towards users.

This is just made all the more true if there is an alternative source for these tools, like Flathub.

> Ever since RH split out workstation and server versions of the OS

Didn't that get undone with RHEL 8?

You're right. And that's something I still don't quite understand.

I'd really like to know how many workstation licenses Redhat really sells. It's been so long, I didn't even realize that they still had a separate workstation license available for purchase. When you have the same distribution setup for Servers and Workstations, it seems to me that one of those flavors is going to dominate and the other will be eventually be neglected. Who are the users that are buying and using Workstation licenses?

But, when it comes down to it, I still don't see why they would want to package an Office Suite for RHEL. Or, more importantly, why a user would want to use it. RHEL is designed for stability. It's a great server OS that's well supported. Because of this, it's also known to have older versions of libraries and programs. This is okay, because many new features and fixes get backported, but it's still usually an older (stable) version of software that's included. Why would you want to have an older version of an Office Suite? Why would they want to package a newer (and riskier) version that can be installed on a server? It just doesn't make that much sense to me... it's a fundamental dichotomy between what makes a good server OS vs a good workstation OS.

Note: this give and take has been going on with Linux on the server vs Linux on the Desktop for decades. It's probably going to keep going on for decades. The things that one wants for one use case isn't what makes sense for other use cases. This is why we have different distributions, which is a good thing. The part I don't get is why RH would want to merge the two back together. Which is why I see the idea of deprecating workstation applications (as packaged by RHEL) in favor of Flatpak versions of them as a good thing from the RHEL point of view.