Flatpak 1.5.1 Prepares For Protected/Authenticated Downloads - Future App Purchasing

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Flatpak 1.5.1 Prepares For Protected/Authenticated Downloads - Future App Purchasing

Flatpak 1.5.1 was released today as a new development release for this Linux application sandboxing technology. With Flatpak 1.5.1 it also begins laying the groundwork for a future payments system around Flathub as what's starting off for allowing donation-based software acquisition but could ultimately turn into a paid app store...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Flatpak-1.5.1-Released

[kenjitamura]

Well, I guess this is a positive because if developers of proprietary software can both make a single application build that works across all linux distros and easily put it behind a secure pay wall we could start to see more of said proprietary software come to linux. I'm not enthused to be able to use more proprietary software on linux myself but it undoubtedly eases the transition for Windows users to come to linux.

[Danielsan]

Well, I guess this is a positive because if developers of proprietary software can both make a single application build that works across all linux distros and easily put it behind a secure pay wall we could start to see more of said proprietary software come to linux. I'm not enthused to be able to use more proprietary software on linux myself but it undoubtedly eases the transition for Windows users to come to linux.

At least, with Flatpak, those should be isolated from the system. I am always concerned about those binaries located in /opt with root permissions...

[schmidtbag]

Well, I guess this is a positive because if developers of proprietary software can both make a single application build that works across all linux distros and easily put it behind a secure pay wall we could start to see more of said proprietary software come to linux. I'm not enthused to be able to use more proprietary software on linux myself but it undoubtedly eases the transition for Windows users to come to linux.

Huh... I wasn't aware there were people on these forums who were both pro-FLOSS and sensible.

[Britoid]

Well, I guess this is a positive because if developers of proprietary software can both make a single application build that works across all linux distros and easily put it behind a secure pay wall we could start to see more of said proprietary software come to linux. I'm not enthused to be able to use more proprietary software on linux myself but it undoubtedly eases the transition for Windows users to come to linux.

It's also pretty good for allowing open-source applications to skip the distro, allowing things like Debian and CentOS to have up to date applications without having to risk the stability of the underlying system.

See how GNOME is pushing a lot of its apps from Flathub now.

[Volta]

Flatpak > Snap.

CLA is unethical.

It's already proven Canonical gives up on their home based solutions. Unity (which actually was good), upstart (terrible imho) and now snaps. I think it's just a matter of time.. Unifying Linux desktop is very important and it's also important to make ground for professional applications like Photoshop and many others, so they'll be portable between different Linux distributions. Systemd, flatpack, Wayland are truly needed and amazing. While I love KDE, Gnome starts to be more and more appealing, because it's built around mentioned solutions.

[Britoid]

Britoid Flatpaked GNOME apps might even come as a single pak for mobile and desktop.

True convergence at package level.

I think before Flatpak/GTK has any chance of being decent for mobile there needs to be some sort of support for limited background services. People won't use a phone if it has a battery life of 30 minutes.

[Candy]

Do they still ship multiple runtimes each ~700mb in size for GNOME, KDE and other environments ? Linux inside Linux inside Linux inside Linux ...

The name Flatpak is a joke. There is nothing flat about it.

[jo-erlend]

I think before Flatpak/GTK has any chance of being decent for mobile there needs to be some sort of support for limited background services. People won't use a phone if it has a battery life of 30 minutes.

The support has always been there. What's missing is the enforcement of it. That's one of the things I liked about Mir; the ability of the display server to know that a window cannot be seen and hence reuse memory and prohibit invisible painting, etc. It is, in my opinion, an absolute requirement of a modern consumer OS, because even though batteries are getting better, there is no theoretical solution to heat. The argument from the Wayland community was that this was easily supported by Wayland, but after all these years, I still haven't seen anyone else supporting it. If it is true that is unproblematic in Wayland, then I hope Canonical keeps those mechanisms in Mir as a Wayland DS.

[Britoid]

The support has always been there. What's missing is the enforcement of it. That's one of the things I liked about Mir; the ability of the display server to know that a window cannot be seen and hence reuse memory and prohibit invisible painting, etc. It is, in my opinion, an absolute requirement of a modern consumer OS, because even though batteries are getting better, there is no theoretical solution to heat. The argument from the Wayland community was that this was easily supported by Wayland, but after all these years, I still haven't seen anyone else supporting it. If it is true that is unproblematic in Wayland, then I hope Canonical keeps those mechanisms in Mir as a Wayland DS.

Not allowing painting of things hidden and partial repaints is recently being added to Mutter.