Earlier this month we shared new app metadata guidelines in response to the growth and maturity of Flathub. Today we're proud to share about that growth in a bit more detail including a huge milestone, how we calculate stats, and what we believe is driving that growth.
Well if there’s an application that the developer only releases a flatpak for, do I have a choice in being one of those million if there’s no easy way to compile it myself? What if I’m a newbie linuxer and cannot get all the dev tools installed?
what’s your point? if flatpak makes it easier for developers to package their software and easier for users to install it, there’s nothing wrong with it being famous
do I have a choice in being one of those million if there’s no easy way to compile it myself?
You always have a choice. Just yesterday, I had an app’s documentation say “install brew so you can download our application and themes”. I noped right out of there and found a different application altogether.
I don’t think there’s any business entity artificially forcing the users to use it (like Firefox on Ubuntu 😉) if that’s you’re asking.
Otherwise, the only case where the user is “forced” to use flatpak would be when the software they’re looking for is not available under their distro’s repo, which happens a lot especially in point release distros.
By choice or by force? I’ll take flatpaks over Appimages and literally rocks over snaps, but what is this metric actually saying?
It is saying that more than one million people are actively using Flathub. What do you mean by force?
Well if there’s an application that the developer only releases a flatpak for, do I have a choice in being one of those million if there’s no easy way to compile it myself? What if I’m a newbie linuxer and cannot get all the dev tools installed?
There are no cases of this that I know of. There are some developers that don’t encourage repackaging their apps, though.
what’s your point? if flatpak makes it easier for developers to package their software and easier for users to install it, there’s nothing wrong with it being famous
You always have a choice. Just yesterday, I had an app’s documentation say “install brew so you can download our application and themes”. I noped right out of there and found a different application altogether.
I don’t think there’s any business entity artificially forcing the users to use it (like Firefox on Ubuntu 😉) if that’s you’re asking.
Otherwise, the only case where the user is “forced” to use flatpak would be when the software they’re looking for is not available under their distro’s repo, which happens a lot especially in point release distros.