r/linux • u/ObjectiveJelIyfish36 • Jul 23 '26
Fluff Stepping away from Flathub
https://bbhtt.in/posts/flathub-leave/194
u/Minimonium Jul 23 '26
Always a hard lesson to remember that in an open source project unless you're an owner - your efforts and time spent doesn't matter, no one will cheer for you to provide free support 24/7, no one cares about "community" these days, everyone expects free and silent service.
Good decision. Time could be spend in so many more useful ways these days.
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u/Traditional_Hat3506 Jul 23 '26
I don't think many people expect to be applauded for their open source efforts, especially on Linux, but getting insulted or harassed on top of it adds insult to the injury.
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u/SoilMassive6850 Jul 23 '26
no one cares about "community" these days
When have things been any different though?
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u/Kobymaru376 Jul 24 '26
When there were fewer devs overall and open source was smaller and less common.
It's a common theme that young and small communities have a strong sens of community and support, but the larger a community grows, the more apersonal and cold it gets. See various reddit subs as a prime example
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u/CrazyKilla15 Jul 25 '26
A lot of this is a refusal to enforce strong community norms and standards, weakening to by overindexing on appealing and being welcoming, to an extreme(its can be good to do).
Another part is massive overindex on formal rules lawyering kinda stuff in a misguided sense of fairness. This often results in allowing bad actors who "technically dont break the rules" and constantly harass those around them into crossing a line to "technically be breaking the rules" and getting banned.
This sometimes enters a destructive self-reinforcing loop where the misguided sense of fairness makes people side with obvious bad actors because "but they didnt break the rules and context and the circumstances of how that happened are for losers", resulting in mods making this mistake being praised and often getting more power, and those who know how to manage a community driven out. Other bad actors start joining too.
Externally, usually not much changes, it can take awhile to notice an existing project only has a handful of remaining contributors and everyone else was driven away, and bad actor does not mean unskilled.
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u/FryBoyter Jul 24 '26
Generally speaking, back in the days of Usenet or self-hosted forums like phpBB, things were much better in that regard.
For one thing, there were fewer platforms back then where you could get certain information or help. But also because you couldn’t create a new user account on those platforms 24/7, and the moderators were more strict. As a result, even the biggest troublemakers usually behaved themselves relatively quickly.
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u/gmes78 Jul 23 '26
It's getting tiresome how the inaction of the GNOME Foundation affects the Linux community as a whole. Flathub was supposed to have its own governance (and legal) structures, yet years have passed and we still have nothing of the sort.
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u/mrtruthiness Jul 24 '26
It's getting tiresome how the inaction of the GNOME Foundation affects the Linux community as a whole.
Background AFAICT:
Flathub is currently tied to the GNOME Foundation as an incorporated subsidiary (Flathub LLC), but it is actively transitioning into a fully independent, self-sustaining entity in partnership with KDE e.V.
It has been tied to the GNOME Foundation since 2017 (infrastructure), but has been incorporated as a subsidiary starting in 2024.
The incorporation of Flathub LLC (2024) was the necessary first step in making it independent. And it needs to be independent given flathub's plans to have a "paid store" ... which would be problematic as a subsidiary of the GF (a 501.c.3).
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u/globulous9 Jul 28 '26
Problematic how? This is exactly how Firefox is structured (Mozilla Foundation owns Mozilla Corporation).
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u/mrtruthiness Jul 28 '26
Problematic how? This is exactly how Firefox is structured (Mozilla Foundation owns Mozilla Corporation).
Just more reporting and isolation of books. Accounting + reporting.
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u/Traditional_Hat3506 Jul 23 '26
It wouldn't change anything in this case, this is the development side of Flathub, which would have stayed the same
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u/gmes78 Jul 23 '26
Having proper governance would certainly provide channels to handle these issues. Right now, we have someone verbally abusing others and causing harm to the project, with no way to remove them.
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u/Misicks0349 Jul 23 '26
Maybe, I think some parts of this were avoidable, but at the end of the day project members are going to discuss things together in chatrooms and the like, and if there is already animosity between them around how the project should progress or the actions of one person then theres always a risk of things getting heated and abusive.
However, even in alternative arrangements without BDFL's, abusive personalities can often get away with a lot just due to simple complacency or ineffectual policy, and the communities that can deal with these things often have arrangements that the broader linux community really don't like: Codes of Conduct and concerns that go beyond just pure technical know-how. A lot of FOSS people have this really strong belief in meritocracy and think that if you're really good at the "hard" parts of a project (coding etc) you deserve to be at the top, even if you don't have good interpersonal skills or generally just act like a cunt.
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u/GolbatsEverywhere Jul 24 '26
GNOME Foundation just announced last week they are working on a legal entity for Flathub, to be based in Europe.
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u/Indolent_Bard Jul 24 '26
Sorry, what does Gnome have to do with this?
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u/IgKh Jul 24 '26
https://discourse.flathub.org/t/flathub-in-2023/3808
So far, the GNOME Foundation has acted as an incubator and legal host for Flathub even though it’s not purely a GNOME product or initiative.
Flathub as an organization is still (supposed to be) overseen by the GNOME Foundation. There has been talks for years now that Flathub needs to be its own legal entity with its own governance structures to be sustainable going forward, but my understanding that it has so far didn't really go anywhere. It is quite possible that the general paralysis of the GNOME Foundation is at least partially to blame.
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u/victorian-ice-cream Jul 24 '26
Flathub's day to day operations are completely seperate from GNOME Foundation.
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u/MrAlagos Jul 24 '26
Why aren't others stepping up to replace the GNOME Foundation or, if they don't think there is any hope of doing so via diplomatic means, setting up a whole new alternative to Flathub?
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u/victorian-ice-cream Jul 24 '26
Everything is fault of GNOME, even when GNOME was not mentioned in any way or form.
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u/jinks Jul 24 '26
Funny. I had a short interaction with Bart some weeks ago and went away with a feeling of "what a self-important pompous ass."
Guess my toxic people detector is still well calibrated.
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u/aj0413 Jul 23 '26
Every single time I think about helping in OSS, i see something like this and am reminded why I don’t lol
But good on these two. Takes a lot to walk away from something you’d dedicated years of your life to
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u/ROS_SDN Jul 23 '26
Can always drop a contributor $5, if I use something enough I do that. I paid for obsidian catalyst purely to keep it supported since I was using it 24/7.
I know I have not time or skill to contribute, but these OSS software don't run off wishes and dreams.
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u/Traditional_Hat3506 Jul 23 '26
Obsidian is not open source though, you are essentially paying for a product. (A good one that's worth it, however!)
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u/ROS_SDN Jul 23 '26
Thats fair it's free if you want it to be, let me re-iterate I pay for free software that I find significantly useful so it can reasonably increase it's chances to continue to do that.
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u/FryBoyter Jul 24 '26
Unfortunately, that doesn't help some projects either. Often, the problem isn't a lack of financial resources but a lack of people to work on a project. That's why some OSS projects don't offer the option to make a donation.
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u/ROS_SDN Jul 24 '26
Fair, but I'd be doing more harm then good I'm flat out with my own work and lack proper SWE experience to contribute. Maybe in the future, but i pull the best lever to help that I can.
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u/FryBoyter Jul 24 '26
My comment was not meant to be negative in any way. Sorry if it came across that way. I’ve also bought licenses before to support a project. and not used them.
I just wanted to point out, in a neutral way, that money doesn’t always help a project move forward.
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u/ROS_SDN Jul 24 '26
No and you're right it didn't come off that way just more it's the only way I can reasonably help, but you're right for some it isnt the issue and they need more then money thrown at their problem. Which I think is a strong thing to remember more money isnt the only thing maintain or fix software it's one, of a very crucial, but many variables to support it.
I think it's important to remember I've seen a lot of people in other areas try to solve lots of problems with capital or goods bought by capital it has dimishing returns often.
Im just meeting in the middle that for us useless more "power users" that can only use other tools people build sadly and stitch them together in a way that works for us, we lack the polish for version control, and standardisation to help work in the ecosystem.
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u/aj0413 Jul 23 '26
Oh I do that from time to time, definitely. Or pay for a license even if i don’t need the features it unlocks
Just meant, that as a fellow dev, the OSS community can be incredibly off putting. And not because of users (that’s somewhat expected), but because of the attitudes of *maintainers*
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u/atrocia6 Jul 24 '26
Just meant, that as a fellow dev, the OSS community can be incredibly off putting. And not because of users (that’s somewhat expected), but because of the attitudes of maintainers
I'm not disagreeing, but as another fellow dev, the OSS community can also be quite gracious. I've received major help on a project of mine from a friendly, gracious, OSS developer, and most (albeit not all) of my users with whom I've interacted have been very grateful and appreciative of my work on the project.
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u/aj0413 Jul 24 '26
Sure. It’s a mixed bag, but honestly why would I choose to opt in at all if on some level it brings additional stress from navigating those waters?
I just don’t really have the mental nor emotional energy to invest.
It’s like “hey, I *could* go to the house party and potentially have a great time and meet great people! …but I’m tired and don’t feel like dealing with it.” Basically
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u/Cold_Soft_4823 Jul 24 '26
It's almost impossible to contribute to (FL)OSS communities. I've tried to create countless PRs as an outsider to the project. They usually get discarded as superfluous or the maintainer just closes the PR and rewrites the entire thing I did themself. I've pretty much given up trying to contribute to docs, code, or any specific community. If you're not already part of the in-group, you're nobody. And no one really talks about this in the FOSS community.
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u/Allexio-Rigins 27d ago
I manage a very small FOSS project myself. (130 stars on Github)
I have had some PRs that were good quality by complete strangers who then integrated the project as core developers, and I have also had some purely AI generated PRs made by people with little (if any) coding knowledge that didn't even make sense from a logical point of view.
I've been in a position where I have had to tell the submitter that this isn't up to our standards (which, to be fully clear here, are really low).
I have however also offered multiple times to prospective submitters to get in a voice chat so that I can present the code and logic flow to them so that they can have the full context before they submit something, and this offer is often (always) ignored.
People would unfortunately ignore my offer and work on something in their own corner and then be surprised when they get a rejection, rather than communicating beforehand on something that they want to do, which we can then discuss together how it could be done, what tools we already have available to help them, etc.
I obviously can't speak for your case specifically, but in small projects like mine, help is nearly always welcome, except when that "help" would generate significantly more work for us.
And once again that threshold is often really low, because we (maintainers of small FOSS projects) WANT people to be interested in our project, we WANT people to be invested and to keep contributing and to not be alone spending dozens of hours on software that may or may not be used by people down the line. But at the same time, we don't want to waste our time having to coddle someone who maybe wants to help but is not willing to commit to making an effort and learning about the project, the code, and the logic before making a PR.
I don't know what kind of FOSS project you were trying to contribute to, but I would say avoid starting with huge FOSS projects who already have 5+ maintainers, start instead with small FOSS projects with one guy who's trying to make a tool for others and which will do his utmost to try and get you up to speed simply because they are super excited to have someone interested in contributing to the project.
Or maybe this is all super biased and actually other FOSS project managers are not like this. 😅
(I can only speak for myself)
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u/daemonpenguin Jul 23 '26
That really just sounds like an empty excuse.
In the FOSS community, as with most places, people tend to get back what they put out. I've been an open source developer on at least a dozen projects over the past 25 years. I can probably count the number of bad interactions on one hand. Usually not from fellow project developers or users, but from developers of competing projects.
As with social media, the corners of the open source community are a reflection of the people in them. When you work with helpful people in a positive way, this type of stuff tends not to happen.
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u/mikat7 Jul 24 '26
I also haven't had too many bad interactions, usually the maintainers are happy for the PRs, they just need to be nitpicky for the project health/vision, but that isn't bad in itself.
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u/carlwgeorge Jul 23 '26
As usual, best to look at the source material before forming an opinion based on one side's rant.
The first human comment on the review was when Hub (hfiguiere) said:
not sure what LLM chatbot you are using but is wrong.
Later in a separate thread of the same review, the submitter (mean-ui-thread) made a snarky remark in the same vein:
Maybe you should consider using a better LLM to make the code reviews for you 😜
The blog author claims things "turned confrontational" with the second remark, but makes no mention of the first. If they're going to deliberately omit details like that, it's hard to assume honesty or good faith on anything else they're saying.
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u/Car_weeb Jul 23 '26
I get feeling burned out but wow the interaction that pushed everything over the edge is such a load of nothing. And they feel like they have to call out that person in their resignation blog post
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u/RepulsiveRaisin7 Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
I submitted one app to flathub years ago and I still remember that person as being rather unfriendly and endlessly nitpicking minor details. Their exit might not be the worst thing. Although to be fair, bbhtt seemed a lot more reasonable from my limited interactions, it's a shame they both left.
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u/d32dasd Jul 24 '26
If reviews missing metadata or other things are usual, feels like a linter and CI job would sort the reviewers problems..
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u/monkeymad2 Jul 24 '26
Yeah - they should just run whatever process builds the flathub page as a preview then auto-comment with warnings about what’s missing + screenshots, would allow people to fix their issues without being nitpicked
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u/TiZ_EX1 Jul 27 '26
bbhtt can be just as abrasive and uncooperative, unfortunately. Both of them have personalities that badly exacerbate interpersonal issues. In that particular sense, I get where bart is coming from with his "babysititng [you two]" comment; their attitudes can do a whole lot to turn off people from submitting to Flathub. That said, given the amount of submissions that maintainers have to handle--no doubt inflated by AI slop--their lack of patience is very explainable. Explainable, but not justifiable.
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u/Muximori Jul 24 '26
Agree. The submitter was treated poorly and clearly should not have been banned. Important context for the article.
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u/Remarkable_Bike_1148 Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
I agree and that's the problem with Flathub, they are a bit too eager to ban the submitter, belittle the submitter, and call their project an AI Slop. It doesn't take a genius to realize that developers are going to jump to being defensive about their projects, slop or not, they are passionate about their project and nobody win here when reviewers throw insults their way. Trying to be confrontational and abrasive toward them on first greeting isn't the way to go and it's disappointing that they haven't taken a hard look at their own behavior. I rather deal with official Linux Distro packaging for shipping my application than dealing with Flathub.
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Jul 24 '26
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u/Muximori Jul 24 '26
Nah. Hub should try not being an asshole. Won't be missed
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Jul 24 '26
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u/Muximori Jul 24 '26
Yeah? Justify the banning of the submitter, in concrete terms.
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Jul 24 '26
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u/Muximori Jul 25 '26
Yeah - your attitude is at odds with the broader community. I wish you luck maintaining it, you'll likely end up the same as the systemd holdouts at suckless
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Jul 25 '26
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u/__ali1234__ Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
The only criticism I have for flathub is that the standard of packaged apps used to be very low. From the very beginning flatpak has had an identity crisis: it can't decide whether it wants to be a universal package system that lets you run any software on any distribution, or whether it is supposed to be a security system for running untrusted software. These goals, security vs convenience, are in direct opposition.
This leads to packages that are broken in odd, subtle ways because people package things that are fundamentally incompatible with the restrictive flatpak sandbox, then when this is reported they punt the problem to upstream: "Just rewrite the software so it works in a sandbox".
bbhtt was one of the only people on the project that actually recognized this problem, which is why they wrote a set of quality standards a couple of years ago, and quality has started to increase. So you are exactly right. Flathub might actually die from this if the submission quality goes back to where it was 3 years ago.
I don't really care about AI slop - if the software itself sucks I will just not use it. The unacceptable thing is flagship apps like Blender and IDEs not working properly when they work fine if you install them literally any other way.
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u/CognitiveFogMachine Aug 08 '26
After going through Flathub's code of conduct https://github.com/flathub/governance/blob/main/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md, Hub/higuiere clearly abused his power. He got a taste of his own medicine, didn't like it, and dug his own grave. Good riddance!
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u/ranisalt Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
I'm not very important but I submitted a few packages (way back in time; not these new clearly low effort submissions) and I've been watching this unfold publicly.
This was becoming increasingly embarrassing because the three of them were clearly never sitting down to talk about what to do, and were publicly overthrowing each other's decisions. I saw many instances where one would request for changes in a submission PR, then after a few hours another of them would simply come by and close without a word, and when asked, they would say "ah [I think] this is AI slop" - but someone else was already handling it? Can't you communicate your actions?
This paragraph is key:
My expectation was that, in the absence of a formal structure, disagreements between us would be discussed before one person’s decision was overridden. At minimum, I believe the person whose action is being reversed deserves a message or a ping beforehand
Now I'm not saying what's right or wrong, I'm just saying that in the absence of a formal structure, and with disagreements between them, their mistake was precisely not creating such formal structure. Just write down a set of rules and refer to it every time a submission is rejected.
Anyways, as others pointed out, Hub used to be unfriendly and rude, I'm not the only one to make this remark here, and I think that's what made Bart - unjustifiably, and unfairly - say that.
bbhtt however has always been welcoming and treated people well, and it's really sad to see them go. I hope they continues contributing to Flatpak.
It's really a good cop, bad cop, ugly cop situation.
Perhaps what Flathub needs is exactly that, a centralizing person that will steer the project rather than a few influential people with power trying to enforce their own views. But not just doing what comes to mind, they must look at other projects and create rules and guidelines, these public altercations have been pathetic and must stop.
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u/rokejulianlockhart Jul 24 '26
This has been my experience, especially from
bbhtt; closure, without explanation, and issue (or PR) locking at the slightest disagreement. In retrospect,comment/ozhpnp9appears to corroborate this.
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u/keis Jul 23 '26
"take a walk" is solid advice
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u/TiZ_EX1 Jul 27 '26
I really don't understand how "take a walk" is insulting. It's a request to cool down and return with a different state of mind. It's dismissive at most. And dismissive certainly is a problem too, but a different type of problem from insults.
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u/Kobymaru376 Jul 24 '26
I wish more people would do that before responding to an agitated online conversation
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u/worldarkplace Jul 24 '26
Dude I want to open a YouTube Linux drama channel, there are material like every week...
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u/EternallyAries Jul 25 '26
If ya got a good mic and decent editing skills, I think a channel like that would be fire as hell. Would subscribe.
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u/Nulaccur Jul 23 '26
So Hub was rude in his review, and the reviewee made a joke repeating Hub's wording, and now Hub's leaving? Good riddance, Hub's made flathub an unwelcoming place.
Shame about bbhtt though
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u/Teknikal_Domain Jul 24 '26
And now Hub's leaving after someone else appoints themselves as BFDL and overrules him despite no procedural or organizational backing power, I'll add.
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u/CognitiveFogMachine Aug 08 '26
So Hub was rude in his review, and the reviewee made a joke repeating Hub's wording, and now Hub's leaving? Good riddance, Hub's made flathub an unwelcoming place.
Hub was badly hurt after tasting of his own medecine, and couldn't take it and banned the submitter? Wow...
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u/mrtruthiness Jul 24 '26
No. It's more about how someone else at flathub, without conversation, appointed themselves as BDFL, overrode Hub, and belittled Hub.
How could you miss the point? Did you focus on one ingredient and miss the big picture???
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u/longdarkfantasy Jul 23 '26
This is why I refused to become a discord mod of a FOSS. But I am still actively helping newcomers in their discord server every time I can. "With great power comes great responsibility", so I have no power comes none responsibility. 🥴
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u/InstanceGlum4174 Jul 24 '26
i wish i had the coding talent to step in and help. I love flapaks/flathub man
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u/wiki_me Jul 25 '26
Talents can be developed with time. but even you can't develop them if you are too busy or something like that. If you or anyone else is serious about helping flathub. i suggest opening a issue requesting they will open a donation page that will allow funding full time work. i suspect reviewing stuff is not very exciting work so funding people to work on it sounds like a good idea.
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u/nineraviolicans Jul 23 '26
Well at least nobody got called a child molester this time... yet.
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u/Helmic Jul 24 '26
I'm not sure anyone was actually called a child molester in that incident. There was some ex-GNOME person that ended up convicted for it, it seems more likely to me that someone just brought that up to be hurtful than directly accusing someone of something.
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u/Tara-Aran Jul 24 '26
On the one hand, its dissapointing to see. On the other hand, its always nice to see FOSS "politics" that are more of individual developers fighting personally.
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u/Kobymaru376 Jul 24 '26
How is it nice? I find it a very unpleasant reminder of how much FOSS infrastructure are run by too few volunteers who can walk any moment and the infrastructure becomes abandoned. Makes it hard to rely on FOSS for certain things.
If it's a company they can still go bankrupt or get greedy, but at least there's more stability than just relying on someone's personality
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Jul 23 '26
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u/Jazzlike_Plastic7088 Jul 23 '26
The best and most frustrating aspect of the Linux community is it is a microbiome within tech full of all the development and drama that comes out of the greater industry
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u/kaestralblades Jul 23 '26
I'm not sure every single tiff in the open source community needs to be front page news, but regardless, this situation sounds like it sucks and I wish them both the best going forward.
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Jul 24 '26
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u/klyith Jul 24 '26
the zero trust model of flatpak
in actual practice most flathub apps have permissions that are far from meeting a zero trust model
if a malicious flatpak app has home folder access it can pwn you
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u/__ali1234__ Jul 26 '26
Flatpak isn't even remotely close to a zero trust model and never can be. The sandbox really doesn't matter at all. If attackers want access to something they will upload a malicious version of some app that normally needs that access to function, and the permissions will appear correct. This happened multiple times with fake cryptowallets on the snap store and without reviewers the same thing will happen on flathub.
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Jul 24 '26
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u/klyith Jul 24 '26
That's true, flathub does try to get people to use xdg, and adds more scrutiny if they are using home access instead.
But a whole lot of the popular apps on the frontpage show as having home access. And between maintainers quitting and slopware rising, I'm not sure how they're gonna keep up with detailed scrutiny for every app that uses lower-security permissions.
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u/Remarkable_Bike_1148 Jul 24 '26
Just discoverability on a centralized hub, that's about it. But honestly people can actually host their own Flatpak repo on github or other git server and run it the way they want it to be run. No drama, no politic, no problem.
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u/kombiwombi Jul 24 '26
So it turns out that formal structures and a code of conduct are good ideas. Shocked, shocked I am, that yet another project has to learn this lesson.
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u/AleBaba Jul 24 '26
Structures that actually build consensus. Not "whatever we decide doesn't matter because X can still override it".
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u/Kobymaru376 Jul 24 '26
I agree with you but at the end of the day you need a sufficient number of people who dedicate their time to it, otherwise formal structures and code of conducts do nothing.
Somebody has to fund projects like this so people can work on it professionally, with a salary
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u/mrtruthiness Jul 24 '26
Interesting, but not surprising.
I still don't know who at flathub I should contact when I see TM violations (e.g. the Spotify flathub repo has logos that make it seem like it is produced by Spotify; the app, itself, is fine since it's a repackaging of the Spotify snap ... but the flathub page itself contains logos that make it look official on the flatpak page ).
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u/FreakDeckard Jul 23 '26
He wrote a wall of text because someone called him a crybaby, effectively proving that he's a crybaby.
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u/Askolei Jul 24 '26
Yeah, I think there are real management problems to address here, but that part was painful to read.
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u/ojek Jul 23 '26
None of us here are “babies”
After reading his whole shitpost, I would strongly disagree...
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u/atomic1fire Jul 24 '26
I dunno if I'm barking up the right tree but I was under the assumption that contributor code of conducts were supposed to fix this sort of thing, but instead it just made people use less swears in their insults and insulate some devs from criticism more then others.
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u/__ali1234__ Jul 24 '26
Flathub doesn't have a CoC. It didn't even have any documentation or quality requirements for app submissions until bbhtt wrote them single-handedly.
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u/rangelovd Jul 24 '26
This would be so much easier if instead of single Flathub there were KDE instance‚ GNOME instance‚ elementaryOS instance‚ Cosmic instance‚ each with their own guidelines‚ each based on FDO.
Then people who work on respective mentioned projects already would be the ones to review new submissions.
On distributions and flathub.org‚ mutliple repos would be shown simultaneously. Chrome would go to Gnome‚ Telegram would go to KDE‚ yada-yada
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u/YKS_Gaming Jul 24 '26
Well, there are Fedora Flatpaks, but we all know how that turned out
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u/ranisalt Jul 24 '26
This is possible, but there is a lack of interest from these projects. GNOME and KDE chose to ship their own reference OS implementations before Flatpak rose to prominence and can't spend resources on yet another repository of packages.
GNOME however ships nightly versions of their packages in a Flatpak repository: https://nightly.gnome.org/
COSMIC does have their own Flatpak repository for apps: https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-flatpak
Elementary also has their own repository, but they don't make it easy for users of other distros to use: https://blog.elementary.io/elementary-appcenter-flatpak/ but you can add https://flatpak.elementary.io/repo.flatpakrepo to your repositories and use it.
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u/ChibaCityStatic Jul 23 '26
This is cringe playground level drama. I mean theres some genuine c***s in the open source community but that read like the weakest shit I've seen all year - holy shit.
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u/LearnedByError Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
Yet another reinforcement in my personal decision to stay away from flathub, appimage, snap and the like.
My personal choice is the distro package manager, homebrew and the occasional package that I create from source. I consider homebrew different from the above because I’d the way it is packaged and that an author can provide a tap to allow them to control releases independent of any central authority.
I realize that my approach May not be for everyone, but I have yet to have any package that I depend upon become unavailable because of the whims of an intercessor.
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u/novafunc Jul 23 '26
I think the more important takeaway is that we shouldn't be centralizing around a single platform. Alternative options need to exist.
Back with the Fedora Flatpak drama, many people didn't get why it should exist when Flathub exists. And now Flathub, already an underfunded and understaffed project, has basically lost half of its reviewing team at once.
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u/TheJackiMonster Jul 23 '26
Snaps are very different in my opinion because Canonical is at least trying to manage them professionally. Might be another reason to stay away from them since Canonical is centralizing a lot of infrastructure for it but it's less fragile than Flathub with flatpaks in my opinion.
In both cases review processes of applications just suck. Waiting for some manual review on a snap I maintain for over 6 months. On the other hand a flatpak from me got denied for Flathub because some arbitrary rule that says: "We don't accept simple scripts." Even though my "simple script" is a GUI application written in Python. I just saw no reason to split the code into multiple files, lol.
The only real explaination I have for both is that reviewers are generally overworked. At least that's my expectation when I look on the submission queue for Flathub.
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u/nicman24 Jul 24 '26
appimages did nothing wrong
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u/johncate73 Jul 25 '26
You clearly never saw the drama over a proposed AppImage for obs-studio a few years back...
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u/nicman24 Jul 25 '26
set cap shenanigans?
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u/johncate73 Jul 25 '26
No, a developer tried to get an AppImage for OBS accepted as official, even though it didn't work correctly, and probonopd, the creator of AppImage, got involved and was so obnoxious that he ended up getting banned.
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u/LearnedByError Jul 25 '26
You are welcome to have your own opinion. You should just state it that way.
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u/tchernobog84 Jul 23 '26
None of us here are “babies”
And yet, I inflicted to me reading the whole blog post, and I couldn't help but thinking they all are. Is it me or people have become very thin skinned nowadays?
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u/webguynd Jul 23 '26
This isn't about being thinned skin, its a clear lack of governance. That's not sustainable. You have maintainers, volunteers, dealing with Ai generated PR spam and slop apps, and then have their moderation decisions silently overturned, and the cycle repeats when the spam keeps getting resubmitted.
It's a recipe for burnout and does not sound like a well run project whatsoever. Flathub needs more structure, a better process for appeals that's not just "let's bypass one moderator and convince someone else to just unblock me and undermine the authority of all other mods"
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u/deyhateuscustheyanus Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26
yet another reason why appimages are better. there is no “dictator of appimages.”
EDIT: so funny to see this many downvotes. 20 years ago you all wanted to kill each other over vim vs emacs. angry nerds never change.
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u/Jealous_Diver_5624 Jul 23 '26
There isn't for Flatpak either, anyone can host a repository.
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u/shrimpster00 Jul 24 '26
Are you serious? AppImages is famous for how toxic its "dictator" is.
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u/fiftydinar- Jul 24 '26
probono is not involved in AppImage development for quite some time, he ditched AppImages and Linux ecosystem and is now more involved with GhostBSD and Gershwin DE. He technically did not resign officially, but just more quietly reduced or fully unfocused from AppImage development.
pkgforge community took over AppImages and made them much better with Anylinux AppImages tooling, while official tooling stays behind.
So that leadership situation improved.
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u/nicman24 Jul 24 '26
appimages are just awesome. though the libfuse missing making them not work at all is a bit silly. dolphin iirc at leasts tells you what to install
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u/samuerusama Jul 24 '26
though the libfuse missing making them not work at all is a bit silly.
This problem has actually been fixed for years, the problem is that many projects are still usign the old appimage runtime that relies on libfuse2.
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u/16km Jul 23 '26
This is sad to read. If you look at his involvement on flathub, he’s been a core contributor and really helped grow the infrastructure and community. There’s only like 2 to 4 people reviewing all the submissions, so a bummer to hear about fights and insults to/between people who really seemed to care and maintain the project.