As an update to everyone following, I had a meeting today with the Flatpak SIG and Fedora Project Leader, which was a very good conversation. We discussed the issues, how we got here, and what next steps are. For anyone not interested in the specific details, the OBS Project is no longer requesting a removal of IP or rebrand of the OBS Studio application provided by Fedora Flatpaks. This issue should be used for tracking of the other specific, technical issues, that the Fedora Flatpak does still have, which I will address below. From our perspective, there were two key points that we feel are the most important to address:
- The issue with the Qt runtime having regression
- The issue of not knowing where to report bugs for what is a downstream package
For the first bullet, this should be resolved with the update to the latest runtime, which includes Qt 6.8.2 that has the fixes for those regressions in it. For the second, this is obviously a much larger issue to tackle, especially for a project as large as Fedora. We had some very good discussion on how this might be accomplished in the medium-long term, but don’t consider it a blocker at this point. We plan to stay engaged and offer our perspective as an upstream project. In addition to those two previously blocking issues, we discussed a handful of other problems with the Fedora Flatpak. I’ll keep the details high level in the interest of brevity on this update:
- OBS Studio running on Mesa LLLVM pipe instead of with hardware acceleration (i.e. the GPU)
- X11 Fallback leading to OBS crashing
- VLC Plugin not behaving as expected in the sandbox, needs testing
- Shipping of third-party plugins in the Fedora Flatpak
The discussion was positive and they are actively working to resolve those issues as well, which should hopefully only affect a small number of users. I would like to give a final thank you to Yaakov and the FPL for taking the time to talk to us today.
I still don’t understand why Fedora feels it is superior at packaging a flatpak over the people who actively develop and distribute their own flatpak.
Sure, the bugs might be fixed now, but Fedora still prefers its own flatpak repo over flathub for little benefit, duplicating the effort of dozens of developers for a worse downstream experience.
If you distribute your app via Flatpak, what benefit is there over “disk space” (irrelevant for all but embedded devices) or the vague superiority complex of distro maintainers to manage your dependencies for you.
Even if downstream fixes a bug or two, those should be merged upstream. Imagine if Fedora staunchly refused to upstream fixes to bugs in the kernel?
Fedora Flatpak exists to match Fedora’s philosophy on FOSS, patented software, and security.
Everything in Fedora must be FOSS and free of legal issues, like codecs. Fedora also takes security seriously, so all their Flatpaks use dependencies all from Fedora repos.
I wonder how much is philosophy and how much is not wanting legal troubles. Those things aren’t contradicting of course.
That’s my main thought as well. If something about yours is better, suggest a fix to the developer. You could both mutually benefit.
Problem is that they have a very staunch stance of not allowing closed source software in their repo. And that apply to flatpak repos too. By default only Fedora own Flatpak repo is enabled, with only open-source software. But why repackage OBS, which is already open-source? My guess would be:
- To use Fedora runtime to minimise install size
- To change how the software is compiled, like removing any “not free enough” bits from the build
If you distribute your app via Flatpak, what benefit is there over “disk space” (irrelevant for all but embedded devices)
Everyone always focuses on disk space, but IMO the real issue is download size, especially when you update a bunch of flatpaks together.
I still prefer the upstream flatpaks over Fedora’s though.
This whole thing has been kinda wild. Every Linux distro bundles obs linked against their own libraries. Because fedora did it in a flatpak it was suddenly a problem?
I get developers being frustrated by buggy downstream builds flooding their queue with useless reports. They ain’t got time for it and can’t do anything about it. But this is open source software and obs had a bad take on distributing it IMHO.
Glad fedora was able to talk it out with them.
There was an official flatpak and fedora repackaged it into their own flatpak repo “poorly” which OBS did not like, because there where issues that OBS team could not resolve like this
Edit: fact check correction
Fedora never called it official. It lacked the verification tick that official Flathub packages get and right under the install button in Gnome Software, the install source says “Fedora Linux”.
You are right! I read that wrong
That was kinda my point. If qt breaks them again and arch updates and links the new QT are they going to come after them too? The position OBS took on this originally seemed like an open source disaster. It sounds like they moderated to something reasonable and that’s great.
Arch is at least more likely to update to a fixed version sooner, and someone getting something with pacman is going to be used to the idea of it breaking because of using bleeding edge dependencies. The difference with the Flatpak is that most users believe that they’re getting something straight from the developers, so they’re not going to report problems to the right people if Fedora puts a different source of Flatpaks in the lists and overrides working packages with ones so broken as to be useless.
Yea, I first read the article wrong and thought fedora marketed it as official
Why is Fedora packaging their own flatpak of OBS in the first place, when a seemingly working, official one is available on Flathub?
Fedora aims for FOSS, software unencumbered by patents, and security.
Flathub explicitly allows proprietary and patented software.
And since they want upstream apps to publish their apps and not scare them away, security isn’t as strong. Apps are allowed to use EOL runtimes and apps roll their own vendored dependencies. Fedora Flatpaks solve this problem by building all their flatpaks from their distro packages.
Oh yeah, that makes sense. Thanks for the info. I was under the impression that Flathub was a default flatpak repo in Fedora anyway.
But yes, always with these trade-offs. It’s bad when package maintainers package software, and it’s bad when software developers package software…
Flathub isn’t quite default, but it’s an option in the setup screen. It’s also the lowest priority.
The official one is delaying updates to its linked libraries due to bugs. Fedora would rather have the security fixes.
Official port linux-cachyos-bore and linux-cachyos-lts for Fedora
So they will let OBS do it?
Provided they fix the issues they outlined, yes.
