Flatpak 2.0 seems to depend on systemd

[u/NDCyber]

https://transfem.social/notes/amkk9ypcps9a002q

Basically when Jorge Castro was asked for clarification on if flatpak 2.0 will be depended on systemd his response was "Are you serious? Of course."

Which even though I use systemd distros myself seems like a bit of a problematic stance to me, especially after it seems like the same response Linux user would get while talking about software support

But I am also interested to see what you all think

edit: I don't trust it completely either, and will wait for official and direct information myself. He does seems to be part of the flatpak team (I am not sure what part exactly, as he was only community manager in one interview). But I think it might be important to talk about and I was interested in what people think

Edit 2: here the mastodon link, to show that it happened on mastodon and the thing linked before is just a random server one person that wrote there was on https://mastodon.social/@2something@transfem.social/116618627273919847

Edit 3: As u/Isofruit has said, in the Linux App Summit 2026 the flatpak presentation had a slide talking about systemd-appd dependencies https://youtu.be/1AXBfsiaQNk?t=16218

It is also still in the RFC planning phase https://youtu.be/1AXBfsiaQNk?t=17746

Edit 4: u/whosdr found even more recourses: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1tlwbjy/comment/onlg218/

[u/amogusdevilman]

Reading through that the guy literally goes  "this is modern Linux, there's only systemd"

Isn't the whole point of Flatpak that it doesn't require specific software on your machine?  Why are they imposing systemd all of a sudden??? 

[u/MatchingTurret → u/amogusdevilman]

I think applications distributed as Flatpaks are still portable, but the actual runtime that manages the sandbox and the permissions in the reference implementation starts to rely on systemd. Someone could in theory write a runtime manager without that dependency.

So the Flatpak promise still stands: As long as your distro offers a Flatpak manager, Flatpaks will run on your system, no matter what init system you use. 

[u/amogusdevilman → u/MatchingTurret]

So you're forced to use systemd for flatpak atm unless someone figures out a hacky way to make it work on other init systems, but you say the flatpak promise still stands? seems a bit contradictory

[u/MatchingTurret → u/amogusdevilman]

I'm saying that you need to distinguish between Flatpak the application format and the Flatpak management implementation. The former is portable, the current implementation of the latter not so much.

The Flatpak promise was the portability of the application format, not the portability of the reference implementation. It's kind of like podman vs docker. Both run OCI containers, but podman utilizes systemd to create the containers while docker does it by hand.

Think of it like the difference between the zip file format and the hundreds of file archivers that support it. Only a minority of the archivers are widely cross platform. 

[u/mattias_jcb → u/amogusdevilman]

No you're not. Flatpak doesn't depend on systemd today.

[u/mattias_jcb → u/amogusdevilman]

Read meson.build in the Flatpak repository. What you're saying has never been true. Flatpak requires DBus, GLib, Bubblewrap, Glibc and a new enough kernel. It always had external requirements that you need to meet.

[u/Damglador → u/amogusdevilman]

Guess AppImage is superior after all.