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Fedora Must (Carefully) Embrace Flathub
(blogs.gnome.org)
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this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2025
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Uhm, isn't bazzite practically what the author is asking for?
Not at all.
Last update (which replaced Discover with Bazaar) changed that.
All FLOSS apps on Flathub are built on trusted platforms by default, in the open and verifiable. Same thing with Brew.
Not including proprietary software in the default config is a valid choice every distro has to make.
The sudden success of Bazzite comes from how easy it is to use.
No it's still unfiltered, we just removed 3 footguns that are pre-installed in the image anyway.
In a way, true. But I don't think they are using flatpak's filter mechanism. I believe the filtering is done by Bazaar itself. That means that even if Bazaar is hiding an app, you are still able to install it manually from the CLI.
The intent is also different. Bazaar is filtering out footguns, like the Steam flatpak on Bazzite (since Steam is preinstalled as an RPM) and Bluefin hides flatpak IDEs.
That's not true. Take LocalSend as an example. It does not build LocalSend on Flathub. It simply takes a GitHub release URL of a compiled tar.gz. And GitHub releases do not have to be built on GitHub, you are able to upload any local file and have it shown as a release.
I agree. But it's also important to have principles and to stick to them. The great thing about Fedora Atomic is that Fedora is able to create their FLOSS OS following their principles and others are able to take that base and build upon it to create their vision.
Fedora doesn't have to be for everyone.
I wish they didn't need to replace Discover and were able to integrate changes into it upstream instead of implementing Bazaar. I'm sure they had their reasons though.
That's certainly part of the motivation (see the 4th paragraph).
Yes, image based. No, not Bazzite specifically, but silverblue (and kinoite) under the fedora banner directly.
But that's not really the point of the article. In order for those to go mainstream, flatpak and especially flathub have a lot of maturing to do first, and the author lays out a pretty good roadmap with thorough explanations.
They're already mainstream, any belief otherwise is ridiculous to the point of being parody.
Meanwhile you have Fedora getting legal threats because they're shipping broken software in their own flatpak repo that exists only to waste developer time and project resources at the expense of its users and their experience.
I'd love to think so too, but I think our echo chamber is pretty tight.
I certainly think they're ready for mainstream usage (I have one Bazzite install myself), but I don't think there's significant awareness beyond the dedicated fan base.
There aren't really any actually useful metrics that I know of, but the only one of the 3 I've mentioned that broke into distrowatch's top 100 is Bazzite, and that's only in the last few months.
And for legal threats: I doubt any court in any country will give credence to that. Fedora is MIT licensed.
The legal threats were credible and resulted in yet more wasted developer time removing that package instead of the entire useless repo.
You're forgetting that millions of Steam Deck consoles have been sold and all of them are flathub exclusive.
On top of that you have: Mint, Vanilla OS, Endless OS, OpenMandriva, PopOS!, Clear Linux, PureOS, ZorinOS, KDE Neon, GNOME OS, Salix, and many others all shipping flathub by default.
Fedora is in a very exclusive group of distros dumb enough to ship their own flatpak repo.
Bringing up Distrowatch stats and "Echo chamber" in the same comment is the most absurd thing I've seen this year.
I think he was referring to immutable distros not being mainstream, not flatpaks.
That's irrelevant to this conversation
What? He said "in order to go mainstream", referring to immutable distros like bazzite.
Bazzite is not immutable, and SteamOS is as mainstream as it gets while being A/B root immutable.
All of them ship Flathub because it's ready for public consumption.
If the attempt here is to argue that cloud native isn't mainstream and change topics from flathub, you are proudly in a bubble of 3% of the computing industry while your peers in the Linux server space and Android run circles around you.
Pretty sure bazzite is immutable, it is based on silverblue after all. But that's besides the point, i just wanted to point out that you probably misunderstood what he was saying. Immutable distros being mainstream kinda depends on how you look at it i suppose. Purely in terms of amount of users, with steamos and bazzite being so popular, i guess you could consider it mainstream, but how many people actually choose a distro because it is immutable? Steamos just happens to ship with the steam deck, bazzite is popular because it mimicks steamos for other devices, and if you look at something else like NixOS, it's more about the system being declarative rather than immutable. It's probably safe to say that flatpak is the most popular third party package manager though, i do agree with that.
You are arguing with Bazzite's primary maintainer. "Immutable" is a bit of a misnomer, especially since multiple directories like /etc are read/write.
Ah i see, i had no idea lol. In that case i stand corrected since he probably knows better than i do. I think the term immutable is causing a lot of confusion, because i also see a lot of other sources online label bazzite as immutable. And then ofcourse there are other projects that use the term composable, or atomic. I guess i fell victim to that confusion as well now.
There are broken Flatpaks in Flathub too. Does Flathub deserve legal threats too? No.
If they behave anything like what Fedora did, yes.
OBS chose Flathub as their official default supported option for their software. Fedora took that software, modified it to update dependencies they weren't ready to use yet, and then put it on their store in a completely broken state with all of OBS's trademarks intact and in a way that made it preferred over the official one, and then fought OBS over removing it for months while it racked up support requests from unsuspecting users (victims of Fedora's shitty policies).
That’s kind of what the ublue project is doing. Bazzite is a part of that, of course. But it also has more “normal” versions like Bluefin (gnome) and Aurora (plasma).
Bazzite is popular precisely because we ignore bad opinions such as these. Flathub is mainstream and all the whinging in the world isn't going to change that.