Flatpak has always been the Red Hat controlled play in containerized app packaging. Red Hat floods Flathub with auto-generated Flatpaks based on their RPMs. Flathub is becoming an app store with an obvious intention of becoming “the” Linux app store, displacing distro packages. Centralization is the whole idea. No significant number of people will ever use Flatpaks from anywhere except Flathub - unless Red Hat makes its own Flathub.
Meme is just a repost so I’m not offended or anything (not that I would be even if it was OC)… but are you maybe seeing “centralization” in the sense of “popularity” instead of “control”? (I agree that the choice of words in the meme could have been better…) - Anyway, even if you are, no worries. I was just curious.
I think the original creator was probably more pointing out how with snap, it is next to impossible to create another app store because the source code for the backend is closed source.
While with flatpak it is fully open-source so anyone who wishes to create a new store can do so. Yes, fighting against what’s popular has always been an uphill battle and that would be the case here also. But there would be no technological or legal roadblocks to doing so.
At least, that’s how I understood it
Disclaimer: I generally prefer native packages over flatpaks/appimages myself. I pretty much refuse to even consider using snaps, for variety of reasons, unless they both open-source the backend code and make some other changes to address other pet peeves I have with the project. I’m not holding my breath though.
