this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2025
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Please don't. I like having options, sometimes RPMs are useful, sometimes Flatpaks are useful. Let me choose.
Using RPMs through a frontend like Discover or Gnome Software can sometimes have unintended side effects that are much more easily anticipated when using dnf.
Just the other day, I uninstalled something through Gnome Software that was an RPM, and it also removed fuse-fs packages, breaking all of my appimage stuff until I manually installed fuse again.
This doesn't ever happen with Flatpak in my experience, though I could just be lucky. It makes some sense to limit the destruction potential for less technical frontend installers like Gnome Software and leave the RPMs to something else like dnf. Though, I do really enjoy being able to open a manually downloaded RPM in a nice GUI to install it.
This. Arch based distros have understood this a long time ago, most ship with no GUI for their package managers and if they ship with one they throw you to a terminal to solve anything, as it should be.
I don't want to deal with any of that, so I run Bazzite, do flatpaks only, and use Distrobox for whatever I can't find on the homebrew package manager.
Exactly this. Kde's graphical application store actually has a warning on arch, since pacman can be even more problematic when it comes to abstraction layers like GUI's.
At this point, rpm's and deb packages can be auto updated through their relevant package managers. And it looks like gnome software is attempting to try to get user packages installed via flatpak entirely.
Distros are still free to make their own RPM packages, they can't go around the GPL there.
But having official flatpak release makes it very easy to update to the latest versions regardless of your distro.
They have different purposes. While I do use flatpak whenever possible there are some things that need to integrate more closely with the OS and the sandbox makes the tool or service useless.
You can still install RPMs through dnf. There is also dnfdragora AFAIK. Packagekit (cross-distro API and daemon that abstracts package managers like dnf and apt) is a pile of crap anyway, and is a source of many GNOME Software's issues.
Why
Flatpaks let me isolate app files and disable permissions, RPMs give me greater access to the system files.