Unlike most (all?) other distributions with built-in Flatpak support, Fedora maintains its own repository of Flatpak applications. Everyone else defaults to using Flathub, where developers of applications themselves tend to publish their Flatpaks. Fedora’s ‘shadow Flathub’ sometimes leads to problems, with Fedora-made Flatpaks containing bugs and brokenness, while presenting themselves as official, developer-made Flatpaks. In turn, users complain to the developers, while the issues they experience are actually caused by Fedora making its own Flatpaks.
One of the applications this happened to is OBS, and over three weeks ago the OBS project requested that either the broken, unofficial Fedora Flatpak be removed, or that it be made clear that the Flatpak was third-party. This request seems entirely reasonable to me, and it would be fairly trivial for Fedora to do this. In fact, I think respecting this request is merely common decency. Sadly, the Fedora project thought differently, and just… Ignored the request.
And so the OBS project escalated the issue.
This is a formal request to remove all of our branding, including but not limited to, our name, our logo, any additional IP belonging to the OBS Project, from your distribution.
Failure to comply may result in further legal action taken. We expect a response within the next 7 business days (By Friday, February 21st, 2025).
↫ Joel Bethke
It seems this caught the attention of the Fedora project, as within less than 24 hours, a formal request was made by the maintainer of Fedora’s OBS RPM package to have the broken OBS Flatpak removed. It seems there’s no official process to follow for making such a request, but I hope it gets through and honoured, if only because, like I said above, it would be common decency to do so.
I do wish to go back to the original OBS complaint, though, as it poses the question most of you are asking yourselves at this point.
I would also like some sort of explanation on why someone thought it was a good idea to take a Flatpak that was working perfectly fine, break it, and publish it at a higher priority to our official builds. We spend an enormous amount of effort on our official Flatpak published to Flathub to ensure everything is working as well as it can be.
↫ Joel Bethke
Why does Fedora maintain its own shadow-Flathub, set at a higher priority than the real Flathub? There’s a few reasons, as detailed in this Fedora Magazine article from 2022. There’s the obvious stuff like Fedora only allowing free and open source software, whereas Flathub also allows proprietary software, meaning that if Fedora ships with the Flathub repository enabled and prioritised, it would violate Fedora’s policies. You can argue back and forth about this, but Fedora’s policy being what it is, I can see where they’re coming from. The article mentions Flathub will split proprietary applications from free and open source ones, but I can’t find any word on if this has happened already.
A second big difference are the sources where the Flatpaks are drawn from. While Flathub allows and all sources, with their packages reusing Debian packages, Ubuntu Snaps, tarballs, AppImages, and more, Fedora exclusively reuses its own RPM packages when creating its Flatpak packages. Furthermore, Fedora Flatpaks use the Docker-like OCI format to publish applications (which ties into the Fedora Registry), while Flathub uses OSTree. Lastly, Fedora Flatpaks use one, single, big underlying runtime, while Flathub has a number of different, smaller runtimes.
The issue here seems to be that the motivations for maintaining a Flatpak repository differ greatly between Flathub and Fedora, but one has to wonder how much of that actually matters to users. Maintaining your own, separate Flatpak repository that effectively duplicates the work developers do when publishing to Flathub is not only wasteful, but also prone to cause bugs, issues, and outdated Flatpaks – which in turn causes strife with the original developers of the applications who have to deal with problems causes not by their own work, but by Fedora – problems that they can’t even fix.
I don’t think this situation makes any sense to perpetuate, and it’s high time Fedora defaults to Flathub for Flatpak applications. It will reduce the workload on package maintainers, prevent needless packaging bugs, improve the experience for users, and make developers happier. It’s a no-brainer at this point.