To everyone saying you can’t mirror a flatpak repo… you’re absolutely right. There should be a far easier way to set up your own mirror without needing to build everything from scratch. That being said, if you wanted to try to make your own repo with every one of flathub’s apps, here you go: https://github.com/flathub https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/hosting-a-repository.html
The tone here is surprisingly negative. Personally I’m happy with the efforts of the Flathub team 🤷
i hope it does 20 billion
Still no proper way to mirror the thing and have it working offline / on internal networks. Great job self-hosters and sovereign citizens ;)
Offline/internal network installs can be handled with
flatpak create-usb- https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/usb-drives.htmlOne can distribute flatpaks along with their dependencies on USB drives (or network shares, etc.) which is especially helpful in situations where Internet access is limited or non-existent.
Cache/mirroring would be great for those who need it.
Edit:
Thinking about it, I wonder if there’s enough “core features” with ‘create-usb’ that its just matter of scripting something together to intercept requests, auto-create-usb what’s being requested and then serve the package locally? If a whole mirror is required, it may be possible to iterate over all flathub packages and ‘create-usb’ the entire repo to have a local cache/mirror? Just thinking “out loud”.
Thinking about it, I wonder if there’s enough “core features” with ‘create-usb’ that its just matter of scripting something together to intercept requests, auto-create-usb what’s being requested and then serve the package locally?
The issue is that… there aren’t enough “core features”. It doesn’t even handle different architectures and their dependencies correctly. It wasn’t made to be mirrored, nor decentralized.
Apt for instance was designed in a much better way, it becomes trivial to mirror the entire thing or parts and for the end tool it doesn’t even matter if the source is a server on the internet, a local machine, a flash drive or a local folder, all work the same.
Flatpaks are not centralized, Flathub is. You can have your own repo.
Yeah sure, just try to mirror Flathub into your repo.
I don’t get it. Why would you store all of it? I mean, you can but… why?
Because…
- Universities might want to locally host a mirror in order to waste less bandwidth and provide faster downloads;
- Large companies usually like to host internal mirrors for the same reasons as above and also so they can audit and pick what packages will be available for their end users;
- Flathub is slow af for some people;
- Local country-specific mirrors are always faster;
- In some countries not everyone can access the official flathub;
- One might be dealing with airgapped networks and systems for sensitive work and you want to have ways for your end users to install flatpaks;
- Fastly, their CDN might go down at any point (like Cloudflare sometimes does) and you’ll end up with nothing;
- Flathub itself may be subject to a cyberattack and their service might get crippled for a days or weeks and you’ll have nothing as well;
For what’s worth Debian archive repositories are about 5 TB and people actively mirror then in universities, companies, cloud providers etc.
The question here isn’t “why would you” but rather “why would I be unable to do it”. Their actively gatekeeping their repository in a futile attempt to be the single and central point of flatpak distribution - much like what Apple does with the App Store.
MVP
Brazil has so many downloads
Does that count for when an OS is wiped and reinstalled or a nerd has like 3 computers and keeps OS flipping?
I’m sorry
Funny how it isn’t popular in countries with population several times larger than the USA. I guess every outside of the US can see through the bullshit of corporate-hijacked open-source.
Or maybe the two countries with a larger population than the United States have significantly lower per capita income and so fewer people own desktop/laptop computers. Most of the world probably has, at most, a smartphone.
If anything, Brazil seems like the outlier on the that map. You’d expect the U.S. to have the most computers. But Brazil and China are roughly similar in terms of income.
Wrong, India and China has the highest number of engineering grads. From NSF:
India awarded 2.5 million S&E first university degrees in 2020, followed by China (2.0 million) and then by the United States (900,000).
With a younger population that is more than ever, a need for laptop would be in the highest demands. In fact, if you check the desktop market share for Linux in India, it is the highest, at around 14%.
Could you elaborate?
Narrator: “But no, they could not elaborate.”
Please check this comment.
China blocked Flathub
Awesome! Love it!
I’d prefer to see downloads per country per capita.
nice
What’s the issue? I installed mint because I know fuckall about Linux, and tbh it’s a dice toss if I have used the Flatpak option not knowing what the actual difference between them are
Flatpak “containerizes” the program, which makes it more secure and less able to accidentally mess up other programs. Fuck if I know how it works.
Also you don’t have to type in your password every time you want to update the program, so that’s nice.
Great opportunity to inject malware to so many vulnerable peeps then
I still not as good as native package
Good is relative tbf. I’ve had issues installing something natively while installing flatpak just worked
It is noteworthy that builds of Chrome, VLC, Dolphin, Steam and Spotify are created by third-party enthusiasts not associated with the main projects.
What great news, that’s why there is no trust in Flathub.
