Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, made the official Ubuntu flavors drop Flatpak from their default software selection.
Ubuntu MATE, Xubuntu and Kubuntu, which used to ship Flatpak by default, will drop it in the next 23.04 release.
As a user, you can still use Flatpak on Ubuntu (and its flavors) and nothing has changed in that regard, but it just won’t be installed by default on any official Ubuntu flavor. Only Snaps (and Deb packages, of course) are going to be available by default in all Ubuntu flavors.
The official Canonical announcement makes it look as if it was a community discussion by using words like “they have made a joint decision…”, however, developers of these flavors clearly hint that they were forced to accept it.
It is not a weird movement from Canonical; the company has an in-house solution for shipping software applications, and official flavors diverging from that solution into a competitor's technology makes them look bad.
It is true that Flatpak is an independent software shipping technology at the moment, but historically, it was supported and adapted by Red Hat and the Fedora communities. Later on, other Linux distributions joined the course such as Linux Mint and Pop!_OS, which despite being based on Ubuntu itself, have opted to use Flatpaks instead.
Arguably, however, both Snaps and Flatpaks have their pros and cons.
But Canonical is clearly not winning the PR war; Snaps’ reputation all over the web is not well-shaped, and many users keep bashing Ubuntu for shoving Snaps up in their mouths as they did with Firefox and Telegram.
One of the longest-standing criticism points about Snaps is that they are very slow to launch. Canonical has done some work in the last few months to help solve this issue (Like reducing Firefox Snap time from ~7 seconds to ~2 seconds), but more work is needed to make them feel native.
Canonical has been actively hiring a lot of folks recently to work on improving Snaps and other projects, especially related to packaging Python apps. One can hope of course that they can succeed in making it better, but it’s hard to deny that the entire show was somehow half-baked.
Canonical invested a lot in making Snaps good for servers and IoT devices, and very little in the Linux desktop; the primary area where Flatpaks shine.
We want to ask you: Do you use Snaps, Flatpaks, or both currently at your main machine?
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Fedora only includes their own Flatpak repo at this point, and In Debian you have to install the Flatpak package and add Flathub manually, so this really isn't a big deal.