Our stance on and plans for Flatpak
I've been wondering what we should do with Flatpak. I'm personally a fan of the good ol' package manager, but I do see some benefits in using something like Flatpak. More so on mobile, where everyone is used to app-stores, than on desktop.
Some benefits I see:
- Sandboxing of apps
- Can act like an appstore using a front-end like Discover without developers needing to package their application for all phone distros out there
- Makes us using Musl less of a problem (I'm not entirely sure about this one)
Flatpak has already been packaged for Alpine Linux, so there is no extra work there. We could set up our own Flatpak repository rather than using Flathub (which has proprietary applications like Skype, Spotify, Steam, etc). In that case developers just have to submit their package to multiple repositories, rather than learning multiple package manager formats.
What do you guys think about this? Any huge benefits or disadvantages of supporting this? If we're going to use this, should we use it as our main application distribution platform, or just along-side the traditional package manager (we will still need the normal package manager for the base system of course)?