This week I saw a poll on Twitter asking what kind of installation / package system was preferred by users. Almost 60% of users continue to prefer the traditional system (repositories), followed by Snap packages, close to Flatpak and a little further, AppImage. To be honest, I have to admit I was surprised, in part because Flathub seems to be more popular than Snapfraft. Preferences will probably not change when Flatpack 1.5.1 is officially launched. The latest stable version was launched at the beginning of October.
Flatpack 1.5.1 launched today as a development version. Among the novelties included, two stand out that speak of transactions. From the looks of it, this application sandbox technology for Linux is preparing to receive payments via Flathub. At first, what they are evaluating is including the possibility of making donations, something like in the AppCenter of elementary OS, but it is not ruled out that in the future there will be applications that can only be installed after making a payment.
Flatpak 1.5.1 prepares to allow donations
Another notable change in Flatpak 1.5.1 is that there will be protected apps and authenticated downloads. These features are not yet available in the stable version of Flatpak, but are available in the version currently in development for developers to start experimenting with. On the other hand, optional support for parental controls has also been included and management has been improved in situations where the hard drive is low on space.
Before I said that this mentioning payments was not going to help users prefer Flatpak packages over Snap or traditional repositories software, but the donations is nothing new. Most developers accept them from the web pages of their respective projects, so the only thing Flatpak 1.5.1 would be doing is offering us a shortcut. That we start seeing paid-only apps on Flathub remains to be seen.
Outside snap they would already be setting fire to the servers haha
I have thought the same.