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.
Worse than that, the issue the article states isn’t that it’s a flat pack, it’s that fedora is pushing their rebuilt flat pack of obs that’s buggy instead of the official obs one from flat hub that works, and then the obs project is getting bug reports for a third party distribution that’s broken.
Because fedora isn’t just pushing flat packs, they’re pushing made by fedora versions of them instead of the official builds from the maintainers.
If I were the OBS devs, I’d make a clear indication on their website when reporting bugs that the fedora version of OBS is unsupported for, well, the reasons they don’t support it.
It seems way more effective than threatening legal repercussions.
It doesn’t mean they are pushing flatpaks, but rather for whatever reason they decided to package their own flatpaks.
Flatpak can support different repos, so of course fedora can host its own. The strange bit is why bother repackaging and hosting software that is already packaged by the project itself on flathub?
One argument might me the security risk of poorly packaged flatpaks relying on eol of dependencies. Fedora may feel it is better to have a version that it packages in line with what it packages in its own repos?
I have some sympathy for that position. But it makes sense that it is annoying OBS when it is causing confusion if its a broken or poorly built repackags, and worse it sounds like things got very petty fast. I think OBS’s request that fedora flag this up as being different from the flathub version wasn’t unreasonable - but not sure what went down for it to get to thepoint of threatening legal action under misuse of the branding.
Fedora probably should make it clearer to its users what the Fedora Flatpak repo is for.
It’s not distro specific. Fedora Flatpaks are just built from Fedora RPMs, but they work on all distros.
If you care about FOSS spirit, security, and a higher packaging standard, then Fedora Flatpaks may be of interest.
If you want a package that just works, then Flathub may be of interest. But those packages may be using EOL runtimes and may include vendored dependencies that have security issues.
And that’s a perfectly fine position to have. I get most of my apps from Flathub.
I also think that Fedora Flatpaks should be allowed to exist. And most of them work without issues. They just don’t get as much testing as Flathub since the user base is smaller.
Fedora has always been one of the flatpak friendly distros.
No, it’s not like snap. Fedora is not removing RPMs and replacing them with flatpaks. It just defaults to flatpaks. Fedora Flatpaks are built entirely from existing RPMs.
Snaps make a little more sense in servers since you can package CLI stuff in snaps, but not in flatpaks. For GUI apps, it’s “fine” but it doesn’t solve new problems, and the way Canonical has migrated apt packages to snaps is aggressive and error-prone.
very interesting. i use mint as a default workstation and i put it on a lot of older machines for older people as a windows upgrade. it just seems to work except for a very occasional audio issue.
lol. so I guess fedora is pushing flatpacks now? I know Ubuntu was pushing snap, so I guess fedora followed suite with a different standard. yay.
thankfully arch isn’t getting into this nonsense
Worse than that, the issue the article states isn’t that it’s a flat pack, it’s that fedora is pushing their rebuilt flat pack of obs that’s buggy instead of the official obs one from flat hub that works, and then the obs project is getting bug reports for a third party distribution that’s broken.
Because fedora isn’t just pushing flat packs, they’re pushing made by fedora versions of them instead of the official builds from the maintainers.
Great explanation.
If I were the OBS devs, I’d make a clear indication on their website when reporting bugs that the fedora version of OBS is unsupported for, well, the reasons they don’t support it.
It seems way more effective than threatening legal repercussions.
It doesn’t mean they are pushing flatpaks, but rather for whatever reason they decided to package their own flatpaks.
Flatpak can support different repos, so of course fedora can host its own. The strange bit is why bother repackaging and hosting software that is already packaged by the project itself on flathub?
One argument might me the security risk of poorly packaged flatpaks relying on eol of dependencies. Fedora may feel it is better to have a version that it packages in line with what it packages in its own repos?
I have some sympathy for that position. But it makes sense that it is annoying OBS when it is causing confusion if its a broken or poorly built repackags, and worse it sounds like things got very petty fast. I think OBS’s request that fedora flag this up as being different from the flathub version wasn’t unreasonable - but not sure what went down for it to get to thepoint of threatening legal action under misuse of the branding.
Fedora probably should make it clearer to its users what the Fedora Flatpak repo is for.
Fedora already has two “warnings” when it comes to their own packages.
First, Gnome Software shows a verified badge for all Flatpaks that are maintained by upstream. The Fedora Flatpak does not have this badge.
Second, when installing a Fedora Flatpak, the label “Fedora Flatpak” shows right under the install button
Sure, this isn’t perfect. Non-technical users may not understand what these mean. But it’s not like Fedora is intentionally trying to mislead users.
Having distro-specific flatpaks really seems to be defeating the whole purpose
It’s not distro specific. Fedora Flatpaks are just built from Fedora RPMs, but they work on all distros.
If you care about FOSS spirit, security, and a higher packaging standard, then Fedora Flatpaks may be of interest.
If you want a package that just works, then Flathub may be of interest. But those packages may be using EOL runtimes and may include vendored dependencies that have security issues.
I prefer flatpaks that work.
And that’s a perfectly fine position to have. I get most of my apps from Flathub.
I also think that Fedora Flatpaks should be allowed to exist. And most of them work without issues. They just don’t get as much testing as Flathub since the user base is smaller.
And that’s a very good answer to a provocative message.
Fedora has always been one of the flatpak friendly distros.
No, it’s not like snap. Fedora is not removing RPMs and replacing them with flatpaks. It just defaults to flatpaks. Fedora Flatpaks are built entirely from existing RPMs.
🙌
interesting… ive not seen anything regarding snaps in mint… flatpak is the other option in the software manager
Mint explicitly goes out of its way to disable snap in favour of flatpaks.
https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/snap.html
The Mint team removed snap intentionally and explain their reasons here: https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3906
cool, thanks for the info!
And that’s the #1 reason to use Mint over Ubuntu!
Snaps make a little more sense in servers since you can package CLI stuff in snaps, but not in flatpaks. For GUI apps, it’s “fine” but it doesn’t solve new problems, and the way Canonical has migrated apt packages to snaps is aggressive and error-prone.
very interesting. i use mint as a default workstation and i put it on a lot of older machines for older people as a windows upgrade. it just seems to work except for a very occasional audio issue.