Flatpak will no longer be available “out-of-the-box” in any of Ubuntu’s official flavors.
In a surprise move, Ubuntu developers have agreed to stop shipping Flatpak, preinstalled Flatpak apps, and any plugins needed to install Flatpak apps through a GUI software tool in the default package across all eight of Ubuntu’s official flavors, starting with the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04 release.
Ubuntu says the decision will ‘improve the out-of-the-box Ubuntu experience’ for new users by making it clearer about what the “Ubuntu experience” is.
They reason, someone using a flavor offering Flatpak might assume the tech will get the same level of support, bug fixes, and development attention from Ubuntu/Canonical as repo and snap apps.
Which is not the case.
As far as Ubuntu is concerned, only deb and snap software are intrinsic to the ‘Ubuntu experience’, and that experience should be maintained everywhere. Flavor leads apparently agree, and they’ve decided to mirror regular Ubuntu by not offering Flatpak features in their default install, in future releases.
Do keep in mind that “not installed by default” is not the same as “not available to install at all”.
To this end, Flatpak continues to be available in the Ubuntu repos, and users of Ubuntu flavors are free to install Flatpak (and any related packages) on their system, manually, as is their wont, anytime they like.
Additionally, Flatpak will not be uninstalled or removed when user makes the upgrade to Ubuntu 23.04 from a version where Flatpak is already present.
My thoughts?
This is a controversial “agreement” — I know some will argue I’m making it controversial by covering it, but c’est la vie – cf. this site is banned from r/linux and I can guarantee they’ll be voicing opinions on this).
Thing is, while I can understand regular Ubuntu not wanting to ship Flatpak OOTB …flavors? Aren’t they, by their nature there to surface alternatives to the vanilla Ubuntu experience? To add and augment; plug gaps; cater to other needs? Flatpak seems like a pretty compelling one.
Ubuntu asking flavors to stop using something because it doesn’t is a bit head scratcher. Flavors regularly use things Ubuntu doesn’t, things you could argue are just as intrinsic to the “Ubuntu experience”, like installers, login managers, etc. Why single out Flatpak?
It’s not like Flatpak is an obscure library in universe with 0.25 developers and an infrequent commit history. Flatpak is robust, actively developed, and well maintained (and spoiler: it’s also not going anywhere).
Now, I don’t care which side of the ‘Flatpak vs snaps’ fence you get your posterior splinters from. I’m a massive advocate of “use what works for you”. Snaps – great! AppImages – cool! Nix – have at it! PPAs only – you do you, babe. Ubuntu flavors wanting to use Flatpak allows their users to access more software on Linux.
So announcing this change without providing a technical reasoning behind why it’s necessary seems off.
Ubuntu is drawing an ideological line in the sand that no-one has asked it to make.
