From the «packed flat» department:
Title: Flatpak “not being actively developed anymore”
Author: Thom Holwerda
Date: Sat, 31 May 2025 06:26:16 +0000
Link: https://www.osnews.com/story/142467/flatpak-not-being-actively-developed-anymore/


At the Linux Application Summit[1] (LAS) in April, Sebastian Wick said that,
by many metrics, Flatpak[2] is doing great. The Flatpak application-packaging format is popular with upstream developers, and with many users. More and
more applications are being published in the Flathub[3] application store,
and the format is even being adopted by Linux distributions like Fedora. However, he worried that work on the Flatpak project itself had stagnated,
and that there were too few developers able to review and merge code beyond basic maintenance.
↫ Joe Brockmeier at LWN[4]

After reading this article and the long list of problems the Flatpak project is facing, I can’t really agree that “Flatpak is doing great”. Apparently, Flatpak
is in maintenance mode, while major problems remain untouched, because nobody is working on the big-ticket items anymore. This seems like a big problem for a project that’s still facing a myriad of major issues.

For instance, Flatpak still uses PulseAudio instead of Pipewire, which means that if a Flatpak applications needs permission to play audio, it also automatically gets permission to use the microphone. NVIDIA drivers also pose a big problem, network namespacing in Flatpak is “kind of ugly”, you can’t specify backwards-compatible permissions, and tons more problems. There’s a lot
of ideas and proposed solutions, but nobody to implement them, leaving Flatpak stagnated.

Now that Flatpak is adopted by quite a few popular desktop Linux distributions, it doesn’t seem particularly great that it’s having such issues with finding
enough manpower to keep improving it. There’s a clear push, especially among developers of end-user focused applications, for everyone to use Flatpak, but is that push really a wise idea if the project has stagnated? Go into any thread where people discuss the use of Flatpaks, and there’s bound to be people
experiencing problems, inevitably followed by suggested fixes to use third-party tools to break the already rather porous sandbox.

Flatpak feels like a project that’s far from done or feature-complete, causing
normal, every-day users to experience countless problems and issues. Reading straight fromt he horse’s mouth that the project has stagnated and isn’t being
actively developed anymore is incredibly worrying.

Links:
[1]: https://linuxappsummit.org/ (link)
[2]: https://flatpak.org/ (link)
[3]: https://flathub.org/ (link)
[4]: https://lwn.net/Articles/1020571/ (link)

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Retrograde <[email protected]d> wrote:
<snip>

After reading this article and the long list of problems
the Flatpak project is facing, I can’t really agree
that “Flatpak is doing great”. Apparently, Flatpak is
in maintenance mode, while major problems remain untouched,
because nobody is working on the big-ticket items anymore. This
seems like a big problem for a project that’s still facing
a myriad of major issues.

Wasn't Flatpak created by Red Hat, or maybe Red Hat put
a lot or resources into to it ? If so and since RHEL is
now owned by IBM, no surprise here. IBM will not spend
money on anything that they believe will not benefit IBM
by 50x the amount spent :)

<snip>

Links:
[1]: https://linuxappsummit.org/ (link)
[2]: https://flatpak.org/ (link)
[3]: https://flathub.org/ (link)
[4]: https://lwn.net/Articles/1020571/ (link)

I guess my avoidance of these *packs Linux has is
conformation yet again simple is better.

--
[t]csh(1) - "An elegant shell, for a more... civilized age."
- Paraphrasing Star Wars

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On Mon, 2 Jun 2025 20:11:16 -0000 (UTC), John McCue wrote:

If so and since RHEL is now owned by IBM, no surprise here.

Yes, that would be a surprise. I thought the understanding of how the acquisition was supposed to operate was that Red Hat would continue to be operated as pretty much an autonomous entity, free from higher-level
executive meddling, precisely because it was the only part of IBM making a decent profit, and the company didn’t want to compromise the goose that
lays the golden eggs in any way.

If this policy has changed, then that’s the end of Red Hat.

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Lawrence D'Oliveiro <[email protected]d> wrote:

On Mon, 2 Jun 2025 20:11:16 -0000 (UTC), John McCue wrote:

If so and since RHEL is now owned by IBM, no surprise here.

Yes, that would be a surprise. I thought the understanding of how the acquisition was supposed to operate was that Red Hat would continue to be operated as pretty much an autonomous entity, free from higher-level executive meddling, precisely because it was the only part of IBM making a decent profit, and the company didn't want to compromise the goose that
lays the golden eggs in any way.

If this policy has changed, then that's the end of Red Hat.

From what I heard, IBM gives large acquisitions them a period of
time of independence, usually it is around 5 years. From the
article below, seems it is starting, this is from Feb 2025:

Earlier this month, Red Hat CEO Matt Hicks
announced that Red Hats middleware team would be
merging with the IBM middleware team.

See:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2025/02/24/what-could-merging-the-ibm-and-red-hat-middleware-teams-accomplish/


--
[t]csh(1) - "An elegant shell, for a more... civilized age."
- Paraphrasing Star Wars

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