At the Gtk+ hackfest in London earlier this year, we stole an afternoon from the toolkit folks (sorry!) to talk about Flatpak, and how we could establish a “critical mass” behind the Flatpak format. Bringing Linux container and sandboxing technology together with ostree, we’ve got a technology that solves real world distribution, technical and security problems that have arguably held back the Linux desktop space and frustrated ISVs and app developers for nearly 20 years. The problem we need to solve, like any ecosystem, is one of users and developers – without stuff you can easily get in Flatpak format, there won’t be many users, and without many users, we won’t have a strong or compelling incentive for developers to take their precious time to understand a new format and a new technology.

As Alex Larsson said in his GUADEC talk yesterday: Decentralisation is good. Flatpak is a tool that is totally agnostic of who is publishing the software and where it comes from. For software freedom, that’s an important thing because we want technology to empower users, rather than tell them what they can or can’t do. Unfortunately, decentralisation makes for a terrible user experience. At present, the Flatpak webpage has a manually curated list of links to 10s of places where you can find different Flatpaks and add them to your system. You can’t easily search and browse to find apps to try out – so it’s clear that if the current situation remains we’re not going to be able to get a critical mass of users and developers around Flatpak.

Enter Flathub. The idea is that by creating an obvious “center of gravity” for the Flatpak community to contribute and build their apps, users will have one place to go and find the best that the Linux app ecosystem has to offer. We can take care of the boring stuff like running a build service and empower Linux application developers to choose how and when their app gets out to their users. After the London hackfest we sketched out a minimum viable system – Github, Buildbot and a few workers – and got it going over the past few months, culminating in a mini-fundraiser to pay for the hosting of a production-ready setup. Thanks to the 20 individuals who supported our fundraiser, to Mythic Beasts who provided a server along with management, monitoring and heaps of bandwidth, and to Codethink and Scaleway who provide our ARM and Intel workers respectively.

We inherit our core principles from the Flatpak project – we want the Flatpak technology to succeed at alleviating the issues faced by app developers in targeting a diverse set of Linux platforms. None of this stops you from building and hosting your own Flatpak repos and we look forward to this being a wide and open playing field. We care about the success of the Linux desktop as a platform, so we are open to proprietary applications through Flatpak’s “extra data” feature where the client machine downloads 3rd party binaries. They are correctly labeled as such in the AppStream, so will only be shown if you or your OS has configured GNOME Software to show you apps with proprietary licenses, respecting the user’s preference.

The new infrastructure is up and running and I put it into production on Thursday. We rebuilt the whole repository on the new system over the course of the week, signing everything with our new 4096-bit key stored on a Yubikey smartcard USB key. We have 66 apps at the moment, although Alex is working on bringing in the GNOME apps at present – we hope those will be joined soon by the KDE apps, and Endless is planning to move over as many of our 3rd party Flatpaks as possible over the coming months.

So, thanks again to Alex and the whole Flatpak community, and the individuals and the companies who supported making this a reality. You can add the repository and get downloading right away. Welcome to Flathub! Go forth and flatten… 🙂

Like all good blog posts, this one starts with an apology about not blogging for ages – in my case it looks like it’s been about 7 years which is definitely a new personal best (perhaps the equally or more remarkable thing is that I have diligently kept WordPress running in the meantime). In that time, as you might expect, a few things have happened, like I met a wonderful woman and fell in love and we have two wonderful children. I also decided to part ways with my “first baby” and leave my role as CTO & co-founder of Collabora. This was obviously a very tough decision – it’s a fantastic team where I met and made many life-long friends, and they are still going strong and doing awesome things with Open Source. However, shortly after that, in February last year, I was lucky enough to land what is basically a dream job working at Endless Computers as the VP of Deployment.

As I’m sure most readers know, Endless is building an OS to bring personal computing to millions of new users across the world. It’s based on Free Software like GNOME, Debian, ostree and Flatpak, and the more successful Endless is, the more people who get access to education, technology and opportunity – and the more FOSS users and developers there will be in the world. But in my role, I get to help define the product, understand our users and how technology might help them, take Open Source out to new people, solve commercial problems to get Endless OS out into the world, manage a fantastic team and work with bright people, learn from great managers and mentors, and still find time to squash bugs, review and write more code than I used to. Like any startup, we have a lot to do and not enough time to do it, so although there aren’t quite enough days in the week, I’m really happy!

In any case, the main point of this blog post is that I’m at GUADEC in Manchester right now, and I’d like to blog about Flathub, but I thought it would be weird to just show up and say that after 7 years of silence without saying hello again. 🙂