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If you are not yet convinced that Fedora Flatpaks is a hostile 'alternative' to Flathub, here's a good one for you:

An indeterminate amount of their packages are, in fact, directly based on existing manifests from Flathub. Not by manually inspecting code themselves; rather, by running a script which goes through Flathub's APIs and parses the respective apps' manifest to generate manifests for Fedora Flatpaks: pagure.io/flatpak-module-tools…

All this, without crediting the original authors.

#Flatpak #Flathub #Fedora

Tree - flatpak-module-tools - Pagure.io

pagure.io
#Flatpak #fedora #flathub
in reply to TheEvilSkeleton 🇮🇳 🏳️‍⚧️

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std::mem::justsoup

This is a new one for me. I thought Fedora had switched to using Flathub by default a while back? Also, what else are they doing? I don't see anything wrong with running a custom vetted repo and copying the manifests from the better maintained Flathub.

(Not trying to reply-guy, just genuinely out of the loop)

in reply to Scott Trakker

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TheEvilSkeleton 🇮🇳 🏳️‍⚧️

I think it's important to distinguish between hostility and whether people are inherently good or bad, as being hostile and good are not mutually exclusive.

They are regularly reminded that Fedora Flatpaks is a bad solution and doesn't address any problems besides the legal side of things, which isn't true whatsoever because Flatpak has technical measures to handle the legal issues.

Developers from numerous projects have openly expressed and criticized Fedora Flatpaks, but the Fedora Flatpaks developers keep insisting and justifying its existence by misinforming people and smearing Flathub, only to obfuscate the fact that they literally rely on Flathub for generating manifests.

This isn't about whether they are good people or not, but it's about whether they're hostile or not – which they are.

This entry was edited (2 days ago)
in reply to Scott Trakker

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TheEvilSkeleton 🇮🇳 🏳️‍⚧️

to be fair, I have no intention in having a productive discussion with them, as a lot of things that come from them are misinformation that were addressed a long time ago, by several people, several times. The last thing they want is productivity, because let's be real — they would have deprecated Fedora Flatpaks a long time ago if they did care about being productive, or at worst limited it for (pre-)installs.

I contributed to Fedora Flatpaks in the past, not by code, but by researching and writing articles:

- fedoramagazine.org/an-introduc…
- fedoramagazine.org/comparison-…

Information about it were much more difficult to find because very little was (and still is) documented. (To this day, people still regularly refer to both articles.)

I had a lot of hope for the project, in fact I even joined the special interest group, but it became evident that none of my suggestions/criticism mattered to the main developers, and they double down on it despite being regularly told by many people from different backgrounds that it's a really bad idea. All they want is to turn it into a glorified distro package repository, and they've been stuck on it since then. Hence me calling them hostile.


Comparison of Fedora Flatpaks and Flathub remotes - Fedora Magazine

This article compares and contrasts the Fedora Flatpaks remote with the Flathub remote.
Hari Rana (TheEvilSkeleton) (Fedora Project)
This entry was edited (1 day ago)
in reply to TheEvilSkeleton 🇮🇳 🏳️‍⚧️

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Lukas

Discussion is taking place. discussion.fedoraproject.org/t…

personally i dont like flatpak but its the best we have in solving the Linux software distribution issue.

i only use flathub in fedora and debian, and only to use software that is not in the repo of the distros. anything but snap which sucks

I see 2 big issues tho:
1. No Credits by Fedora
2. No Licence of the Manifests from Flathub


Some Fedora Flatpaks re-use Flathub app's manifests without crediting the authors

Fedora Discussion
in reply to Lukas

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TheEvilSkeleton 🇮🇳 🏳️‍⚧️

@lukas

> The comments over there (so far) are by people who don’t understand Fedora nor flatpaks, it seems.

discussion.fedoraproject.org/t…

This is often the kind of sentiment resonating around Fedora, in my experience. If you don't agree, you "don't understand" it. Never mind the fact that I used to contribute to Fedora in the past, where my earlier contributions were articles about Fedora Flatpaks!

- fedoramagazine.org/an-introduc…
- fedoramagazine.org/comparison-…

Sincerely, this comes from someone who was deeply interested in Fedora Flatpaks and wanted to push it in a non-hostile direction, but the developers have shown that they just want to turn it into a 'traditional package manager with extra steps'.


Comparison of Fedora Flatpaks and Flathub remotes - Fedora Magazine

This article compares and contrasts the Fedora Flatpaks remote with the Flathub remote.
Hari Rana (TheEvilSkeleton) (Fedora Project)
@Lukas
in reply to TheEvilSkeleton 🇮🇳 🏳️‍⚧️

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Kyle Gospodnetich

You have my full support, if anyone at Fedora tries to tell you you don't get it, remind them that Bazzite and Bluefin and Aurora have had orders of magnitude more success than Fedora's offerings and depend on flatpak as the default install method. We go out of our way to remove every trace of Fedora Flatpak and our store even ignores the repo if installed by the end user or brought over from someone rebasing. To do anything else would be a disservice to our users.
This entry was edited (1 day ago)
in reply to TheEvilSkeleton 🇮🇳 🏳️‍⚧️

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TheEvilSkeleton 🇮🇳 🏳️‍⚧️

Taking the liberty to cross-post my involvement with Fedora Flatpaks; originally posted on Fedora Discourse.

4 years ago, I discovered Fedora Flatpaks, and developed a strong interest with the tech and approach behind it. After having a thorough understanding of it, I wrote two detailed articles about Fedora Flatpaks:

Mind you, I also designed the banners (just highlighting how much I cared about promoting it back then).

I also asked to open a Matrix room (2022/01/01), which was rejected:

discussion.fedoraproject.org/t…

As time went by, I started losing interest, because there wasn’t much progress with the project, and it was duplicating effort that could have otherwise heavily benefited Flathub and every party involved (GNOME, KDE, elementary, freedesktop.org, Endless Foundation, etc.), which would have benefited Fedora, too.

This realization led me to write “Where Fedora Linux Could Improve § Only Ship Unfiltered Flathub by Default”, which criticized the lack of progress with it, as well as addressing one of the “legal concerns” (2022/12/06):

tesk.page/2022/12/06/where-fed…

(Side note: I’ve also heard from Flathub folks that they received legal advice in regards to these issues.)

This led to some community members to react and start the Flatpak SIG project, to accelerate development — 2 days after my blog post (2022/12/08):

fedoraproject.org/w/index.php?…

Then, a Matrix room was (finally) created and publicly available (2022/12/10):

fedoraproject.org/w/index.php?…

By the way, I was never reached out or invited to join the SIG, despite putting in so much effort and time to accelerate development.

However, despite that, I still tried to participate in the project, and added myself to the SIG as well:

fedoraproject.org/w/index.php?…

Any of my suggestions then were either rejected with no proper explanation, shrugged off, or sent to /dev/null. And whenever I asked for source for obvious misinformation, it would be dismissed.

I tried to push Fedora Flatpaks in a direction that would have been less controversial and more productive by limiting its scope, which would also enable us to allocate more resources on other stuff. However, once again, I wasn’t really taken seriously; at least I personally don’t feel like so.

Eventually, I lost every last bit of interest and removed myself from the SIG (2023/02/20):

fedoraproject.org/w/index.php?…

All this to say, I tried really hard to keep my opinions to myself, and communicate diplomatically with them; I even wrote articles after doing several hours of researches in the span of weeks to show my interest, but I was treated extremely unfairly in return. So this naturally led me to one conclusion which I still hold today: they’re not looking for diplomacy; they just want to do whatever they want, even if it ends up upsetting/hurting people and projects’ image — I have the same sentiment with RPM packagers, too.

#Fedora #Flatpak #Flathub #Flatpaks


Where Fedora Linux Could Improve

The Fedora Project is a great organization to gain experience no matter the team you are in. I am currently a part of the Fedora Websites & Apps team improving my technical writing, communication and design skills.
TheEvilSkeleton
#Flatpak #fedora #flathub #flatpaks
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