The Future of Flatpak

Summary

At the Linux Application Summit (LAS) in April, Sebastian Wick said that, by many metrics, Flatpak is doing great. The Flatpak application-packaging format is popular with upstream developers, and with many users. More and more applications are being published in the Flathub application store, and the format is even being adopted by Linux distributions like Fedora. However, he worried that work on the Flatpak project itself had stagnated, and that there were too few developers able to review and merge code beyond basic maintenance. I was not able to attend LAS in person or watch it live-streamed, so I watched the YouTube video of the talk. The slides are available from the talk page. Wick is a member of the GNOME Project and a Red Hat employee who works on "all kinds of desktop plumbing", including Flatpak and desktop portals. Flatpak basics Flatpak was originally developed by Alexander Larsson, who had been working on similar projects stretching back to 2007. The first release was as XDG-App in 2015. It was renamed to Flatpak in 2016, a nod to IKEA's "flatpacks" for delivering furniture. The Flatpak project provides command-line tools for managing and running Flatpak applications, tools for building Flatpak bundles, and runtimes that provide components for Flatpak applications. The project uses control groups, namespaces, bind mounts, seccomp, and Bubblewrap to provide application isolation ("sandboxing"). Flatpak content is primarily delivered using OSTree, though support for using Open Container Initiative (OCI) images has been available since 2018 and is used by Fedora for its Flatpak applications. The "Under the Hood" page from Flatpak's documentation provides a good overview of how the pieces fit together. Slowing development Wick started his talk by saying that it looks like everything is great with the Flatpak project, but if one looks deeper, "you will notice that it's not being actively developed anymore". There are people who maintain the code base and fi...