Recently I highlighted a fight that had broken out between the OBS Studio team and the Fedora Linux developers. The issue was centred around the Fedora Flatpak of OBS Studio but it seems to have calmed down now.
Things got pretty messy with the legal threat from the OBS Studio team, but thankfully it appears to be mostly solved down thanks to the two camps coming together to discuss it properly.
OBS Studio team member Joel Bethke said in the ticket on GitLab:
As an update to everyone following, I had a meeting today with the Flatpak SIG and Fedora Project Leader, which was a very good conversation. We discussed the issues, how we got here, and what next steps are. For anyone not interested in the specific details, the OBS Project is no longer requesting a removal of IP or rebrand of the OBS Studio application provided by Fedora Flatpaks.
This issue should be used for tracking of the other specific, technical issues, that the Fedora Flatpak does still have, which I will address below.
From our perspective, there were two key points that we feel are the most important to address:
- The issue with the Qt runtime having regression
- The issue of not knowing where to report bugs for what is a downstream package
For the first bullet, this should be resolved with the update to the latest runtime, which includes Qt 6.8.2 that has the fixes for those regressions in it.
For the second, this is obviously a much larger issue to tackle, especially for a project as large as Fedora. We had some very good discussion on how this might be accomplished in the medium-long term, but don't consider it a blocker at this point. We plan to stay engaged and offer our perspective as an upstream project.
In addition to those two previously blocking issues, we discussed a handful of other problems with the Fedora Flatpak. I'll keep the details high level in the interest of brevity on this update:
- OBS Studio running on Mesa LLLVM pipe instead of with hardware acceleration (i.e. the GPU)
- X11 Fallback leading to OBS crashing
- VLC Plugin not behaving as expected in the sandbox, needs testing
- Shipping of third-party plugins in the Fedora Flatpak
The discussion was positive and they are actively working to resolve those issues as well, which should hopefully only affect a small number of users.
I would like to give a final thank you to Yaakov and the FPL for taking the time to talk to us today.
Nice to see a resolution!
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
This is not the first incident with Fedora Flatpak shipping broken applications, the Bottles situation a while back comes to mind. If Fedora have a problem with security on Flathub, like Matt's been saying, why not work with Flathub rather than putting resources into Fedora Flatpaks? I firmly believe that users and developers alike would prefer to have Flathub be the main place to download flatpaks. To me this is the sort of duplicate work and "not invetened here mentality" that drains resources the Linux community don't have.
Edit: I hope I didn't come of as too negative. I'm a Fedora user myself and really appreciate the hard work the community put in. I'm not however a user of Fedora Flatpak and don't see the benefit in even having it over Flathub.
Last edited by Brokatt on 20 Feb 2025 at 12:32 pm UTC
Fedora can do what they please, it's their platform, but I already went ahead and removed the Fedora Flatpaks from my computers. Glad that I can at least do that and preemptively rid myself of any potential unncessary headaches in the future.
Last edited by Pyrate on 20 Feb 2025 at 3:07 pm UTC
Rather the issue is "Why do we need Fedora Flatpak?".
One of the original reasons for creating Fedora Flatpaks was legal and FOSS compliance reasons. Red Hat was afraid to give users full access to Flathub, as it ships lots of proprietary applications but also lots of applications that support patent-encumbered formats like H.264. Red Hat is very careful about not packaging those in the main Fedora distribution, so giving access to Flathub by default would have been seen as a way to endorse those packages (even if Fedora themselves did not package it).
Their stance has changed slightly over the years, but Flathub is still not enabled *by default* as of Fedora 41: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/workstation-working-group/third-party-repos/
Between Fedora 35 and 37, only a filtered subset of Flathub was also available this way unless you downloaded the Flathub repository file and added it yourself.
Last edited by Calinou on 20 Feb 2025 at 9:45 pm UTC
One of the original reasons for creating Fedora Flatpaks was legal and FOSS compliance reasons. Red Hat was afraid to give users full access to Flathub, as it ships lots of proprietary applications but also lots of applications that support patent-encumbered formats like H.264. Red Hat is very careful about not packaging those in the main Fedora distribution, so giving access to Flathub by default would have been seen as a way to endorse those packages (even if Fedora themselves did not package it).
I don't use Gnome but I thought there was a toggle in Gnome Software to filter out proprietary software? I'm pretty sure KDE Discover has one. If there isn't then it can't be that much work to implement them and have Fedora enable those by default. Same with patent formats like H.264. Add a toggle and have Fedora enable it by default, let users decide if they want to change it. No reason to build and maintain a total separate repo.
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