Ah, Linux, you gotta love it right? There's numerous different ways to do the same thing. One of those that people like to argue about is packaging and how to install things on Linux. Flathub with Flatpaks at least seem to be popular and it keeps growing.
Cassidy James Blaede just wrote up an official blog post going over some numbers, and it's quite impressive to see. To date it shows that Flathub has served just about 1.6 billion downloads, has over 2,400 apps (850 of which are Verified by the author) and there's now over 1 million active users too. Their public dashboard has some pretty fun stats.
One of the big reasons for the growth no doubt is the Steam Deck, which has a full KDE Plasma desktop mode in SteamOS, and has Flathub for all the extra apps and games you can install. A point that was touched on in the blog post noting that some of the most popular downloads on Flathub are emulators and game launchers.
It's not just Steam Deck though with Flathub being included out of the box across the likes of Clear Linux, Endless OS, KDE Neon, Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, and Zorin OS and Fedora 38.
I think Flathub is great personally, it's often made it far easier to tell people where to grab something that's actually up to date. Telling people "it's on Flathub, install via GNOME Software or KDE Discover" makes Linux a lot easier.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
I hope Flatpak grows even stronger, because it is one of the main reasons Linux is being able to thrive too.
CruelAngel Jan 26
There are 8 billion ppl out there, lets say 4 billion of them have access to internet on a PC, and Linux has a 2% user base, that means 80 million ppl useing Linux. If that is true, then comparatively the 1 million users of Flathub is suprisingly low.
Quoting: CruelAngelQuick and extremly dirty math:Even more surprisingly low given that recent figures I've seen here at GoL suggest Linux usage at significantly higher than 2% (general use, not gaming). On the other hand, it may well be that some distros grab some Flatpaks from Flathub and put them in their own repositories, so that when you download the Flatpak from your distro's own get-software-thingie you aren't a "user of Flathub" but you are indirectly depending on Flathub. So, Flathub's influence could be quite a bit broader than the 1 million figure suggests.
There are 8 billion ppl out there, lets say 4 billion of them have access to internet on a PC, and Linux has a 2% user base, that means 80 million ppl useing Linux. If that is true, then comparatively the 1 million users of Flathub is suprisingly low.
On the other, other hand, Ubuntu uses Snaps (although some of its derivatives don't), and it's pretty popular.
Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 26 January 2024 at 5:14 pm UTC
PublicNuisance Jan 26
Quoting: PublicNuisanceI always try to use the packages in my distro's repo but Flatpak has become my go to when that's not a viable option. AppImage isn't bad either.
This, repo first, flatpack next :)
CyborgZeta Jan 26
Quoting: PublicNuisanceI always try to use the packages in my distro's repo but Flatpak has become my go to when that's not a viable option. AppImage isn't bad either.I'm the opposite. With the exception of tools like my file manager, archiver, partition manager, etc., I grab all my programs as Flatpaks from Flathub.
ElectricPrism Jan 27
QuoteFlathub has served just about 1.6 billion downloads, has over 2,400 apps
Very impressive, congratulations to @all. The quality of FOSS on the store is great, and while predicting the future is hard -- I am modestly optimistic about their efforts to make a commercial area of the store someday.
Similar to the debate when Proton was first announced, I think that such a development would have a net-positive effect and we could start getting commercial developers income so we can improve Linux' image to commercial developers and get ourselves some great pro-tools.
I happened to be on FlatHub searching the chatapps the other day and it's really great to have such a resource to discover new leads. Long gone is the day of browsing text entries on synapsis on ubuntu and wondering what each package was or even if it was actively developed.
Quoting: ElectricPrismI've long thought that one of the most potentially important things about Flatpaks is about closed, mostly non-game software. That stuff can't be packaged by your distro, so the ability for vendors to build their stuff in a fairly easy, pretty solid, distro-agnostic way could go a long way towards reducing complaints about Linux fragmentation.QuoteFlathub has served just about 1.6 billion downloads, has over 2,400 apps
Very impressive, congratulations to @all. The quality of FOSS on the store is great, and while predicting the future is hard -- I am modestly optimistic about their efforts to make a commercial area of the store someday.
redneckdrow Jan 27
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