Oh, FLAT hub!
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
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Linux
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It's just me distro hopping sorry guys
Aren’t we all?
A normal Tuesday for a Linux user.
Next time, use a VPN so it doesn’t all show in the US.
They're on the feddit.uk instance, so it's more likely that they're British. Either their VPN prefers USA servers for some reason, or they've only done about 138 million downloads at most.
honestly surprised more than half of the apps on Flathub are verified! I expected it to be less
back before the redesign, it felt like most apps had "note: this wrapper is not made by, or affiliated with the original developers" somewhere
Looks like Java finally has company in the exclusive 3 billion club
How does flatpak make money? I feel like I should be paying for the bandwidth im using since it can't be cheap.
They don't. They have a CDN sponsor.
Flathub wouldn't be possible without the generous support of the following organizations and individuals. Organizations & Infrastructure
- Codethink
- Cloud Native Computing Foundation
- Fastly
- Mythic Beasts
- Prerender.io
- Scaleway
surprisingly russia is at 5th.
Graphs like this will always be population graphs. Russia is the 9th most populated country with 140 million people.
Linux has always had a strong showing over there. If I had the misfortune of living there I'd certainly want all the privacy and autonomy I could get...
And probably some security bars for your windows and balcony, so that you don't accidentally fall to your death...
And have a taste tester for food
Speaking of countries, I'm surprised that China isn't in the top 10, especially considering their efforts to reduce reliance on US tech.
Maybe it's somehow related with the Great Firewall and they are not included in the statistics correctly.
I'm sorry I didn't notice. Then it's a little unexpected.
They likely have their own homegrown alternatives, you think Xi the Poo would allow such corruption of his people by giving them access to corrupting capitalist software such as non approved encrypted messaging services?
There aren't really home-grown alternatives
And it's not like it didn't have a reason. A lot of closed "capitalist" software has been seen in not very good and honest actions. And the penalties for this were very light. Yes open source mostly is a different story.
I'm sure the authoritarian dictator is being benevolent and looking out for the good of his people when building the firewall and locking down the internet.
Don't be a fool. Just because you can point to closed sourced bad actors doesn't mean it was done for anything less than control.
I don't like Flatpaks, but I guess this is better than nothing.
I'm surprised China doesn't have a lot. Are they not using Flathub, or perhaps Flatpaks?
If I remember correctly deepin which is the popular distro uses their own store of appimage files. That may have something to do with it
Take a look from this perspective: with distro packages, a separate person (the package maintainer) has to build a piece of software against the versions of dependencies the distro offers, which are not the ones the developer of the software uses and tests against. Then you have users that encounter bugs with this build of the software, and the developer of the software receiving bug reports against all kinds of dependency matrices, whose combinatorial complexity is overwhelming. With the different paces of distros in terms of package versions this is inevitable. On top you have overworked package maintainers which leads to sparingly updated distro packages or even orphaned ones.
For no party in the linux ecosystem this is a great experience.
Either it is this, or giving packages the opportunity to not share dependency versions, which can cost a bit of disk space. With the low price of storage, I think it becomes quite clear why flatpaks are so popular. Also in the end, users do not shape the linux landscape like they would with commercial products, as distros do not rely on sales to users. Developers and maintainers shape the landscape, and so what floats their boat is largely what happens.
For linux as a whole, flatpak is one of the greatest things that ever happened. For the first time, one can treat it as an actual platform, and that makes it a strong ecosystem.
I wouldn't be a Linux user if it weren't for flatpaks. Finally I can install the apps I need and they just work.
I don't like flatpaks or snaps or anything like it either, but I think they help a lot in situations like the Steam Deck or PinePhone where you want the base to be able to move slowly and be stable, while letting the apps on top move quickly.
The problems with flatpaks and similar is that it allows and even encourages developers to stick with horrendously outdated libraries, and your system is only as safe as the container's isolation defenses.
They also make it more difficult to go in and directly modify or tweak the program as the user.
And many developers are no longer offering bare-metal options.
They are probably having internet connection problems in China
Flathub is not blocked
I'd expect them having their own state controlled version
Chinese people use the same distros we do generally. But Linux is seen as much more of a professional thing there, and i think the people using it probably just compile things themselves, and have less of a need for flatpak. Huawei actually had a Linux laptop they were offering for sale for awhile, and a lot of the people buying it were having the store clerk put a cracked version of windows on it for them lol.
I'm doing my part.
Wow that must be atleast like 7 linux users overall taking into account all the distro hopping and redownloading lol.
Cool! It's the main way I install GUI apps now.