Flathub Vying to Become the Standard Linux App Store

Linux has a plethora of package managers and app stores. There's apt, dnf, yum, zypper, pacman, GNOME Software, Discover, and Synaptic.

For modern Linux distributions, however, you can also add Snap and Flatpak into the mix. Those last two have, for some time, struggled to gain much traction. However, over the past couple of years, those universal package managers have finally gained considerable popularity.

But only one of those tools is vying to become the de facto standard app store for Linux.

Flatpak has secured $100k in funding and is aiming for $150k more. Their goal is to prepare for higher operating costs and to bring in another full-time staffer.

This comes on the heels of Canonical announcing all official Ubuntu spin-offs would no longer ship with Flatpak installed by default.

Recently, Robert McQueen (Endless CEO and president of the GNOME board), penned a blog to not only state how strong the Flatpak growth is (with more than 700,000 app downloads a day) but to state that they plan on establishing an independent legal entity to own and operate Flathub (which is currently hosted by GNOME).

McQueen says in his blog, "Flatpak has, in my opinion, solved the largest technical issue which has held back the mainstream growth and acceptance of Linux on the desktop … namely, the difficulty for app developers to publish their work in a way that makes it easy for people to discover, download (or sideload, for people in challenging connectivity environments), install and use." He adds, "Flathub builds on that to help users discover the work of app developers and helps that work reach users in a timely manner."

As far as what the future holds, the plan is to launch a new Flathub web experience, add verification features, turn on Flatpak repo subsets to enable users to select only verified and/or FLOS apps, enable direct app uploads as well as donations and payments, and create Flatpak focus groups and an advisory board.