Fedora 37 Proposing To Allow Unrestricted Access To Flathub

To this point Fedora out-of-the-box has been restricted to a filtered subset of Flathub packages when enabled via GNOME Software or GNOME Initial Setup. However, legal has now cleared Fedora for allowing unfiltered/unrestricted access to Flathub, allowing a far greater selection of Flatpaks to become available on Fedora Linux with the plan for this to begin with Fedora 37.

Fedora's packaging around Flatpak has been a filtered version of Flathub for what is then presented within GNOME Software or allowing to be installed from the command line with flatpak. This filtering can be restored later if the need presents itself but for now Fedora is cleared to offer unrestricted Flathub access. In cases of overlaps, the Fedora Flatpaks will be preferred over Flathub.

This planned change allows easy access to a much greater range of software and avoids confusion by users why some Flathub offerings are not available on Fedora.

There is some possible opposition to this change in its current form though because Flatpaks have higher priority over RPMs within GNOME Software. So this change may run into some problems unless GNOME Software is altered in its behavior around Flatpaks vs. Fedora RPMs. There is also some concern over some Flathub packages not being built from trusted, high quality third party sources.

More details on this proposed change for Fedora 37 via the Fedora devel list. The matter of opening up Fedora access to all Flathubs has also been discussed via this fedora-workstation issue tracker ticket.