Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

Posted Mar 28, 2023 22:36 UTC (Tue) by dowdle (subscriber, #659)
In reply to: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default by atnot
Parent article: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

As I wrote in a comment here when the announcement was first made, and I'm not Canonical fanboi... Red Hat nor Fedora ship with snap preinstalled so why should Ubuntu ship with Flatpak pre-installed? I'm not sure why they added it in the first place.

snap and flatpak have some overlap in functionality, but snap is made for all package types whereas flatpak is only targeting graphical desktop applications.

Since the announcement, at least one person (the LearnLinuxTV YouTube guy) has put together an Ubuntu remix that includes flatpak pre-installed along with some pre-installed flatpaks from flathub... and as was pointed out in the fine article... manually adding it post install isn't that difficult if I understood correctly.

Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

Posted Mar 29, 2023 1:18 UTC (Wed) by champtar (subscriber, #128673) [Link]

On Ubuntu you can end up with curl but the snap version, which has extra sandboxing. I don't remember the error, but trying to POST a file that was in a forbidden path was giving a cryptic message, and without strace I would have never found what was happening. Would be nice to have a message when the sandbox blocked some file access.

Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

Posted Mar 29, 2023 14:33 UTC (Wed) by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733) [Link] (3 responses)

Fedora/RedHat will never embrace snap because it is tied to a closed source server controlled by a single vendor. That is neither in the interests of the community nor RedHat.

How to setup one's own flatpak repository?

Posted Mar 30, 2023 2:41 UTC (Thu) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link] (2 responses)

I believe I read somewhere that Canonical did release the source to the snap server-side but that it wasn't current with the version they were running. I don't now if that disparity would hinder someone setting up their own snap repo or not.

Practically speaking, Flathub is the only flatpak respository I've heard of... although I think Fedora has some packages available as flatpaks. I'd like to find some documentation on how to setup my own flatpak repo. Do you know where I might find some? I don't really want to create new/custom flatpak packages, I'd just like to mirror an existing repo... or download the flatpaks I'm interested in... so I can host them on my LAN... so all of my hosts don't have to download the same things from off-LAN. Admittedly I haven't looked really, really hard for documentation... but if it exists, I haven't found it. Any pointers?

How to setup one's own flatpak repository?

Posted Mar 30, 2023 5:43 UTC (Thu) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]

https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/hosting-a-repository.html

How to setup one's own flatpak repository?

Posted Mar 30, 2023 14:54 UTC (Thu) by nedrichards (subscriber, #23295) [Link]

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists elementary https://flatpak.elementary.io/repo.flatpakrepo

if you want to install the apps from the elementary OS AppCenter (for example). Back in the day when I was working at Endless we had our own repo for Endless OS specific stuff as well.