Flatpak and your distribution

FOSDEM 2018

Flatpak uses unprivileged Linux containers to install and sandbox desktop apps. Some Linux distributions are getting excited about Flatpak, while others are not so sure yet. This talk aims to describe what Flatpak is good for, how it can help your distribution, and how your distribution can help Flatpak.

This talk is intended for an audience of distribution developers who are aware of the general purpose and structure of Flatpak, but perhaps not the finer details. The same speaker will be giving an introduction to Flatpak in the Packaging devroom on Saturday.

Topics I plan to cover are:

Flatpak for backports within a distro
Flatpak for upstream apps, especially the ones this distro doesn't have
Non-use-cases: things the distro can do better another way
Building better Flatpak runtimes from distro packages
License compliance

Speakers: Simon McVittie