A very VERY, wanted feature when I introduced Flathub to my friends, they hate the terminal and everything about it. They aren’t very technical and don’t know how to operate it.
And I never see any type of Flathub Integration into these Stores. Why? Not even Fedora! I saw a demo by baby WOGUE about a Software store SolusOS was working on. Don’t know what happened with that tho.
Can PureOS make this happen and be the first to ship Flatpak support into the Store itself out-of-the-box?? So you can actually install and search for Flatpak apps?
Are you sure it’s not in Fedora? It’s been a couple months since I used Fedora, but I definitely remember being able to install from Flathub in GNOME Software. It might not have been out-of-the-box, but at least with Flatpak enabled and Flathub added as a repo, I could choose the source of individual apps from a drop down menu at the top-right.
The choices were typically Fedora’s rpm repo, Fedora’s Flatpak repo, or Flathub’s Flatpak repo.
@wctaylor is right. After enabling the Flathub repo you can search and install Flatpak apps from GNOME software. Even automatic updates work out of the box.
PureOS will not ship Flathub integration out of the box because Flathub contains non-free software. To provide a software store that recommends non-free software out of the box would cost PureOS its FSF-approved status.
As for other distros, an issue with providing Flathub out of the box is that the distro has no input over what software goes into Flathub. A user may think they can go to the distro for support when the bug may stem from something that’s out of the distro’s hands.
I would like to see GNOME Software have the ability to filter out non-free software (put another way, allow the user to filter apps by free/non-free license), so that we can add Flathub without proprietary apps suddenly popping up in the app store.
Can confirm Flathub working in Gnome Software on Fedora. Just need to enable the repo, then flatpaks show up alongside other apps.
On the other hand, for the Librem 5 I’m not even sure Flathub works as is, except maybe for apps based on e.g. Python. My understanding is that apps containing compiled code must be flatpak’ed specifically for each target architecture. So 64-bit Intel/AMD is one thing and 64-bit ARM something else completely.
Gnome Software has a couple of settings for flagging non-free apps and warnings before install, but AFAICT nothing to remove them from view entirely. Probably not enough to get FSF approval.
These settings are not available from inside Gnome Software, you need to use dconf or similar tools to change them.
maybe your friends would enjoy more the .AppImage way of downloading/storing/running software on their machines. it is similar to M$ .exe in that EVERYTHING is contained in the “archive” and when it is deleted everything goes with it … but it has other issues if you look at it from different points of view
i just gave this example because from the perspective of CONVENIENCE for the USER it seems to be the way to go … only it’s shitty for developers and other technical people … again pleasing the majority will require a “blood” sacrifice
Yea I agree. But as Purism is as great as they are. Couldn’t they actually just ask for the separation of Free & Prop software? With what you said, "filter out non-free software". I think so.
Yeah, I have seen Flatpak on the software repo on Fedora. When activated it never comes up anything Flathub related into the software store. Which makes me think it doesn’t work at all
I am very familiar with AppImages. Very nice to see those exist But really they are a little stupid … and so AppImages wouldn’t help either, maybe it would- I’ll try it thanks tho.
