In regards to “trust,” it could be media bias, BUT I’ve seen more articles regarding malicious software finding its way into the Snap Store, but NOT into any Flatpak repositories.
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That’s likely a virtue of the way the submission process works on flathub. Humans review every new application submission. You almost certainly won’t get a dodgy app through that process in the same way that the snapcraft process has been up until now.
However, the snapcraft process has (is being) changed, so there is now added human review.
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The barrier of not knowing about linux or commands. Someone starting out and by chance reads something that uses flatpak will hit a wall if they feel that installing flathub or not knowing about the lack of the flatpak would confuse them. I have seen it with students.
Also, really bad idea/practice to argue or even think that the barrier is one command away. That literally could be applied to anything installed by default on ubuntu server or any distro for that matter.
your Fedora and basically arguments like that I will not be answering them since you are trying to take the conversation away from the original scopet:
Having flatpak installed. It does not consume a lot of storage for the installation and simply gives an option for users to use it.
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Well… you know what also didn’t consume a lot of space? The included games. Those were removed recently. Not using a lot of space isn’t enough to justify being included. Users still have the option for to install flatpak if they wish to do so. There’s even a setup guide on the flatpak website. Could it be made easier, as in to make flatpak appear installable in the App Center? Maybe. I’d love to see flatpak packaged as a snap, if that’s even possible. But anyways, on a lot of distros you have to install flatpak yourself, and so you refer to the guide on the flatpak website, this is no different. If you know what a flatpak is, you probably know how to open the terminal and copy those commands. Even if flatpak was preinstalled, you still had to open the terminal in order to add Flathub. As an end user, if you don’t know how to open the terminal and how to use it, then you probably don’t know what flatpak is either. And you probably do not care either. The average user doesn’t care what is the technology behind, all that matters is what they see, and if it works well enough not to cause issues with the workflow. And so, people that are affected by this issue, if you could even call it that, are people that are advanced enough to install flatpak by themselves, and then also enable Flathub (because that’s what most people use flatpak for).
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Not sure you understood that Ubuntu goal was to compete with Win/MacOS on easiness for the user
Saying " this is 2 command line away , let’s do nothing" won’t push linux forward
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Nope , When you click install on flathub , the flatpakref file will open with gnome-software and the repo automatically added and the software you asked installed
This was really well designed to allow smooth installation for normal user , you know , the initial goal of Ubuntu 20 years ago
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Ubuntu hasn’t been using Gnome Software for a few years now. And Ubuntu’s goal is to ship an easy to use and polished experience out of the box, and that is regardless of flatpak existing or not.
Furthermore, shipping flatpak would mean that the desktop team has to ensure a good experience with it, which isn’t really Canonical’s priority.
Not only that, but the flatpak package is in the universe repo, not main:
Which means it’s a community maintained package, not a package directly maintained by Canonical. Which is another reason as to why it cannot ship with the distro. That’s also why GDebi couldn’t be included by default as a temporary replacement for installing downloaded third party deb packages until an update to the App Center gets pushed for that.
Finally, each distro dictates what the default user experience is like. And in Ubuntu the default user experience when it comes to supported package formats consists of deb and snap packages. No one will stop you from getting packages in other ways if you wish to do so however.
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I don’t understand. Ubuntu at its core is just Linux, so installing and using flatpaks takes less than 2 minutes. If you don’t like the philosophy of using snaps, you don’t have to use them. Heck, you don’t even have to use Ubuntu if its so irksome! There are plenty of other fantastic distros out there. I like snaps and think they have come a long way
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The original premise of this thread doesn’t match reality, IMO, since it’s saying that an average user is going to be left completely clueless if they encounter Flatpak and it’s not already installed.
The Flatpak format, for all intents and purposes, is exclusively distributed through the Flathub software store. One of the first few links on Flathub is “Set Up Flathub”. On that page, you’re told to pick your distribution - Ubuntu is the first one listed. Once you choose Ubuntu, you’re given a step-by-step with the exact commands to run in order to be able to install Flatpak applications on Ubuntu.
Bottom line: it’s not what Canonical wants to support, but it’s there and easy to use if you want it.
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