Flatpak Support

Since Xubuntu and Kubuntu are both including flatpak support by default for 23.04 will Lubuntu be doing the same ??

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As far as I am aware, there are no plans to stop supporting Flatpaks in Ubuntu 23.04 or any future version. Lubuntu is Ubuntu but with a different desktop environment, configuration, and apps, so it should also continue to support Flatpaks without problems.

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What I mean is that the above flavours will be enabling flatpak in the default install, so you can install and run them out of the box :slight_smile:

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I’d have preferred if you’d provided your sources for the question (esp. official sources for Xubuntu & Kubuntu), as chances are I’ve had read it (along with most team members I suspect), but a refresher as to what caused your question would have been helpful.

I suspect for Xubuntu you’re referring to this post by Sean - Xubuntu Development Update December 2022

I’m unsure with Kubuntu (no recent posts come to mind), but I haven’t really looked (part of the reason for wanting source for your query is it provides a timeline for changes which is really useful & often saves effort!)

As Kubuntu is Qt5 based like we are, looking at how they would accomplish it maybe closest to what they need… I don’t have a timeline (not having the source for your initial question), but looking at the current seed file

https://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-archive/seeds/kubuntu.lunar/desktop

a quick search for ‘flatpak’ shows what you maybe referring to.

Sure we could add more support; but others users of Lubuntu ISOs (inc. reviewers) complain about the size of our ISOs, so adding more features will increase the ISO size which just increases complaints. Also will most users benefit from it?

I’ve not looked at what resource hit that would make (impact on size of ISO, memory required in operation etc), but obviously you feel it’s worth it for you. As a team we may discuss it and try and weigh that against what we believe most of our users will use/want.

Thank you for your query & suggestion.

Will we? I have no idea at this stage, but we’ve still got a lot of this development cycle remaining so we’ll have to wait & see.

Note: this is my opinion, and I’m writing here as me, and not providing any official response for the team, as I’ve not discussed this issue with the team.

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Thanks for your feedback!

I don’t think flatpak support would increase too much the size of the image.

I can tell you that firing up a Kubuntu VM will show you that, by default, Kubuntu ships with Flatpak.

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Even though this decision has been thankfully dropped, No grudges against flatpak, but flatpak qt apps wont theme and look consistent with what has been specified by the user to lxqt as unlike kde, lxqt doesnt have portals and runtime that help these sandboxing packages integrate with the system, i had discussed this with upstream lxqt devs and they clearly told they arent even a bit interested in taking measure to integrate such app formats with lxqt, for more clarity, take lubuntu and kubuntu separately and try using qt flatpak and snap apps, in lxqt they look pathetic from every aspect even their font size and rendering isnt proper but in kubuntu they integrate well even if they dont fit with non-kde themes.

So to summarize shipping software that dont integrate well with the DE isnt a ideal thing and hence this things arent to be even discussed (Firefox Snap is exception as both flatpak and snap theme gtk apps properly)