If there's one thing you can always count on in the Linux world it's that packaging can be a nightmare. The OBS Studio team are not happy with the Fedora folks due to Flatpak problems and threatened legal action.
I’m not surprised that the OBS devs are considering suing Fedora for their Fedora Flatpaks.
For anyone out of the loop:
Fedora’s been packaging and providing apps as Fedora Flatpaks which cause users trouble cause they’re honestly pretty shit and known to be unreliable. The issue is that users assume that these faulty packages are provided by the Original Devs and complain towards the ODevs.
As endless waves of users complain towards the ODevs it causes them unnecessary headache as well as costing valuable time and resources to tell users that it’s actually Fedora fucking things for everyone.
All of this is unnecessary because if Fedora stopped installing Fedora Flatpaks as the default then there wouldn’t be this problem in the first place.
Wait, why is Fedora making their own flatpaks? I thought the entire point is that they work on any distro and everybody gets the original source from flathub.
IMO, same reason they have their own repo, which eventually feeds into Red Hat enterprise, to have a trustworthy, curated set of safe (ish) software that’s had eyeballs on it. A worthy enough goal, but that said, it applies a lot less to flatpaks. I personally used to remove theirs because I didn’t like having multiple sources, now I’m on Bazzite which ships with flathub.
I asked this exact thing somewhere else, and the best answers I got were:
there is a somewhat legitimate motivation for fedora to package their own flatpaks in the context of their atomic desktops project.
they started doing this before flathub was established, and it was a better idea at that time.
So, as per usual with Linux, there are some obscure and historical reasons this is a thing, but it is useless for the majority of users. Fedora should really not have it configured as the default source for flatpaks out of the box
Wait, why is Fedora making their own flatpaks? I thought the entire point is that they work on any distro and everybody gets the original source from flathub.
Just to add to the other replies you’ve got, as far as I’m aware there’s no reason why you can’t add Fedora’s flatpak repo on another distro. Why you would want to is another matter, but I think the fact that anyone can make their own repo is the fundamental strength of flatpak as opposed to snaps; it’s not tied to one organisation, Flathub is the de facto central repo but it doesn’t always have to be.
Thank you for the context. I’ve been kind of out of the loop with Linux on general and have been using fedora… But now a question. What’s the most stable form of package and which distros use it by default? I’ve been kind of confused my the whole all image, flatpack, etc thing.
The most reliable way to distribute software on Linux is still to make a statically linked binary (linking with a very old glibc is fine) and use curl | bash. But that isn’t always possible depending on the language used and the app.
Seems like OBS Studio is C++/Qt, so it shouldn’t be too difficult though. I’ve done it before in the distant past. But looking at their releases they only provide .deb for Linux, so I can understand why people would want something else.
I’ve made several Qt apps (in C++) easily packaged using AppImage. Perhaps OBS is harder because they require some level of integration with the hardware (e.g. the virtual camera perhaps requires something WRT drivers, I don’t know), but in the general case of a Qt app doing “normal GUI stuff” and “normal user stuff” is a piece of cake. To overcome the glibc problem, it’s true that it’s recommended using an old distro, but it’s not a must. Depends on what you want to support.
As a user, I prefer a native package, though (deb in my case).
cause they’re honestly pretty shit and known to be unreliable.
Can you elaborate here? I’ve had very few issues with Flatpaks and the documentation is pretty thorough. I’m curious what wider issues it has to make the whole ecosystem “pretty shit” and unreliable.
They have individual people maintaining over a thousand flatpacks.
I don’t believe this to be the case with Flathub, only the Fedora repo. I’m asking about the wider flatpak ecosystem, not the fedora-specific repo or how it’s setup.
Additionally, if you go to install the real flatpack, Fedora pushes you to use their poorly-maintained unofficial one instead.
I’d agree that seems like a needless hoop at the very least, but my concern is more to do with the growing trend to shit on Flatpaks as an ecosystem, not just this particular instance of Fedora head-assery.
I think it’s decent software and has really solid use-cases, far from unreliable shit at least in my own anecdotal experience. But my experience is limited, which was why I asked the OP to elaborate on actual flaws they see with the Flatpak ecosystem.
I’m not surprised that the OBS devs are considering suing Fedora for their Fedora Flatpaks.
For anyone out of the loop:
Fedora’s been packaging and providing apps as Fedora Flatpaks which cause users trouble cause they’re honestly pretty shit and known to be unreliable. The issue is that users assume that these faulty packages are provided by the Original Devs and complain towards the ODevs.
As endless waves of users complain towards the ODevs it causes them unnecessary headache as well as costing valuable time and resources to tell users that it’s actually Fedora fucking things for everyone.
All of this is unnecessary because if Fedora stopped installing Fedora Flatpaks as the default then there wouldn’t be this problem in the first place.
Wait, why is Fedora making their own flatpaks? I thought the entire point is that they work on any distro and everybody gets the original source from flathub.
IMO, same reason they have their own repo, which eventually feeds into Red Hat enterprise, to have a trustworthy, curated set of safe (ish) software that’s had eyeballs on it. A worthy enough goal, but that said, it applies a lot less to flatpaks. I personally used to remove theirs because I didn’t like having multiple sources, now I’m on Bazzite which ships with flathub.
This is pretty much how Ubuntu turned into the shitshow it is now.
I don’t see much of a reason to create a customized flatpak, since at this point you might as well just create a binary for dnf.
I asked this exact thing somewhere else, and the best answers I got were:
So, as per usual with Linux, there are some obscure and historical reasons this is a thing, but it is useless for the majority of users. Fedora should really not have it configured as the default source for flatpaks out of the box
Just to add to the other replies you’ve got, as far as I’m aware there’s no reason why you can’t add Fedora’s flatpak repo on another distro. Why you would want to is another matter, but I think the fact that anyone can make their own repo is the fundamental strength of flatpak as opposed to snaps; it’s not tied to one organisation, Flathub is the de facto central repo but it doesn’t always have to be.
Thank you for the context. I’ve been kind of out of the loop with Linux on general and have been using fedora… But now a question. What’s the most stable form of package and which distros use it by default? I’ve been kind of confused my the whole all image, flatpack, etc thing.
Personally I’d recommend installing in this order:
There isn’t one. It’s still a shit show.
The most reliable way to distribute software on Linux is still to make a statically linked binary (linking with a very old glibc is fine) and use
curl | bash. But that isn’t always possible depending on the language used and the app.Seems like OBS Studio is C++/Qt, so it shouldn’t be too difficult though. I’ve done it before in the distant past. But looking at their releases they only provide
.debfor Linux, so I can understand why people would want something else.I’ve made several Qt apps (in C++) easily packaged using AppImage. Perhaps OBS is harder because they require some level of integration with the hardware (e.g. the virtual camera perhaps requires something WRT drivers, I don’t know), but in the general case of a Qt app doing “normal GUI stuff” and “normal user stuff” is a piece of cake. To overcome the glibc problem, it’s true that it’s recommended using an old distro, but it’s not a must. Depends on what you want to support.
As a user, I prefer a native package, though (deb in my case).
Can you elaborate here? I’ve had very few issues with Flatpaks and the documentation is pretty thorough. I’m curious what wider issues it has to make the whole ecosystem “pretty shit” and unreliable.
They have individual people maintaining over a thousand flatpacks. There’s no time to test anything.
Additionally, if you go to install the real flatpack, Fedora pushes you to use their poorly-maintained unofficial one instead.
I don’t believe this to be the case with Flathub, only the Fedora repo. I’m asking about the wider flatpak ecosystem, not the fedora-specific repo or how it’s setup.
I’d agree that seems like a needless hoop at the very least, but my concern is more to do with the growing trend to shit on Flatpaks as an ecosystem, not just this particular instance of Fedora head-assery.
I think it’s decent software and has really solid use-cases, far from unreliable shit at least in my own anecdotal experience. But my experience is limited, which was why I asked the OP to elaborate on actual flaws they see with the Flatpak ecosystem.
The Fedora flatpacks are pretty shit, not the overall concept.