Flathub Grows Past One Million Active Users
Flathub Grows Past One Million Active Users
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.
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As a noob, can someone briefly explain flatpaks and why they may be preferred?
Glad you asked
- containerized apps
- more secure than regular install
- less clutter
- no dependency hell
- open source (in opposition to snap)
Containerization is not mandatory, some flatpaks are not air-gapped at all which is a real bummer. I wish they all were.
Can they not be closed down with flatseal?
Thanks for mentioning this. I didnt know.
For some apps this is just annoying. Like on Cryptomator
It seems like even with extremely permissive permissions, flatpak app still have some degree of sandoxing.
https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/sandbox-permissions.html
As mentioned above the host option does not actually provide complete access to the host filesystem. The main rules are:
These directories are blacklisted: /lib, /lib32, /lib64, /bin, /sbin, /usr, /boot, /root, /tmp, /etc, /app, /run, /proc, /sys, /dev, /var
Exceptions from the blacklist: /run/media These directories are mounted under /var/run/host: /etc, /usrAre you referring to the ones with excessive sandbox permissions that flathub allows by default? Or is this something else?
It is also much easier to install and update, since it don't require restarting the computer, and also works on all distro.
Exactly. Thanks for pointing it out.
Fortunately though, there are programs like Flatseal that let you remove permissions from Flatpak packages, although it's kind of a bummer when you have to set these permissions manually and test which of them break the program and you have to turn on for it to work at all.
That was my guess, from others' context. Hits almost all of the good points.
How containerized though? Could it be a replacement for a docker server "farm" on a single machine or is it know for apps to simply use locally?
Good question. Docker can be used for orchestration which I‘m pretty sure is a lot more than flatpak is designed for. So if this interests you (I‘m fine with docker) feel free to try it out and update me.