Converging and diverging paths

Well, this kerfuffle over trademarks shows the dangers of the "every website to its own" approach, but the central store has a very different set of issues - Apple and Microsoft and Google like the central store because it provides a nice convenient toll-booth.

The FLOSS world should be firmly behind trademarks, and treat them with respect, because they provide the legal guarantee that you're actually getting "the real deal". That was why trademarks were introduced in the first place! And the "every product on its own website" isn't a problem if trademarks are respected and enforced.

Rule 1 - don't mislead your users! Okay, some users do a damn good job of misleading themselves, but we should most definitely not be setting out to mislead others, and if somebody points out that our actions ARE misleading (intentional or not) then we should FIX IT. That's the tragedy here - that it's easy to see why/how users would be mislead, and Fedora seems unable to see the problem.

Why are distros using flatpacks??? They're meant to be distro-agnostic packages, so as original distro software, they don't make sense.

Cheers,
Wol

When you install Firefox with winget it's literally downloading and running the same installer you'd have downloaded from the Firefox website. When you install git it pulls down the same all-in-one Git for Windows installer from the Git For Windows Github page that's linked on the Git website.

By contrast, Flathub really is a central repository of binary packages, accompanied by a central build infrastructure. Flathub hosts it's own binaries, and, apart from a few notable exceptions, requires packages to be built on its own infrastructure.

It's more than the Microsoft Store, even, it's really a proper package repository, just distribution independent with a focus on desktop applications, much coarser dependencies, and a few other minor technical differences compared to traditional Linux package repositories.

When you install an open source application from flathub you get, apart from. said exceptions, a binary that's hosted on Flathub infrastructure, built on Flahub infrastructure from upstream sources.

They're moving in different directions, but that seems like it's because they're coming from different places and moving towards the same place. Flathub and the Windows store have a lot more in common with each other than either of them have in common with the approaches they want to displace.

The "app developer" packages the app themselves and uploads it through a fully-automated developer portal. Dependencies come from an integrated "SDK" or "Runtime" (these terms are basically synonyms), not piecemeal the way dpkg or rpm do it. If you want dependencies outside the SDK, you vendor them. You are solely responsible for what you include in your uploaded bundle, no matter where you got it from; the SDK, on the other hand, is dynamically linked and can receive bug fixes without you doing anything. If your app is properly sandboxed, it cannot load any code that isn't part of either the SDK or the app bundle, no matter what any other app that happens to exist on the machine might do.

The biggest difference is that Flatpak lets end users add repositories, but that's an ability they inherit from APT and YUM, not a change.

(Full disclosure: While I have not actually uploaded a Windows app to their store, I've uploaded an add-on for Edge, which uses a developer portal called the "Partner Center" with a somewhat-prominent button to enroll in additional programs, including "Windows: Register as an app developer to submit apps and games to Microsoft marketplaces." Also, I've uploaded Android apps, and, from the outsiders' perspective, the Play Store and the Windows Store work exactly the same.)