Simon McVittie

Like every year, during DebConf21 the Debian Technical Committee wishes to share with you what we are up to. First of all, of course, we will go over the issues that have been brought to us. But, following up from last year's presentation, we will continue presenting our ideas in how to reshape or reimagine the Technical Committee in a way it works better and is more useful for the project.

Other people: Sean Whitton Elana Hashman Gunnar Wolf David Bremner Christoph Berg Niko Tyni Margarita Manterola

What does the Technical Committee do? How can it work better for Debian? This year, we will do a short recap of our activities last year, but the main focus we want to give to this BoF is how to best move forward and reshape the Technical Committee in a way that works better, and thus is more useful for Debian.

Other people: Sean Whitton David Bremner Elana Hashman Gunnar Wolf Margarita Manterola Philip Hands Niko Tyni

The availability of namespaces inside user sessions is increasing, and Valve's Steam game distribution platform is taking advantage of this for better gaming on Linux.

A recent beta of Steam for Linux adds pressure-vessel, an experimental mechanism developed by Collabora to put games in containers. This gives the game partial isolation from various aspects of the host system, and in particular allows it to use a runtime library stack that is not entangled with the host's, with different games using different runtimes.

Meanwhile, the unofficial Steam Flatpak app distributed on Flathub puts the entire Steam client and all of its games in a container. This gives the Steam client more thorough isolation from the host system, but all the games have to share that single container.

In this talk, pressure-vessel developer and Flatpak contributor Simon McVittie will compare the two approaches and the challenges they encounter, and look at where Steam containers might go in the future.

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

Flatpak uses unprivileged Linux containers to install and sandbox desktop apps. It resembles traditional packaging systems like dpkg and RPM in some ways, but is very different in other ways. This talk will introduce Flatpak's model for packaging, how and why it differs from traditional packaging systems, and how Linux operating systems can benefit from having both.

Traditional packaging systems like dpkg work with small, granular packages with a web of interdependencies. Flatpak is intended for user-facing GUI apps ("leaf packages"), which each have a single dependency: a "runtime" that collects all the libraries that the app needs and doesn't bundle.

Key topics:

• The problems Flatpak sets out to solve: why traditional packages aren't always a good fit
• How Flatpak mitigates the problems associated with bundled libraries
• Avoiding data duplication and wasted space

This talk is intended for an audience of developers and sysadmins familiar with traditional packaging systems, but perhaps not the details of Flatpak.

The same speaker will be giving a follow-up talk on Flatpak's relationship to distributions, in the Distributions devroom on Sunday.

smcv has a proof-of-concept for generating Flatpak runtimes and apps from Debian packages, but limited time and server bandwidth. There seems to be broad interest in shipping production-quality runtimes and apps. How do we get there from here? Do others want to help?

Flatpak uses unprivileged Linux containers to install and sandbox desktop apps. This talk gives an overview of how Flatpak and its portals behave and how they're implemented, both on the packaging/distribution side and the sandboxing/security side. It will also cover what problems Flatpak sets out to solve, the situations where Flatpak can help Debian achieve world domination by complementing what we already have, how it compares with other technologies, and the situations where some other technology (such as apt or Docker) is a better tool for the job. The intended audience for this talk is Debian maintainers with general packaging/sysadmin knowledge, but not necessarily a desktop or freedesktop.org development background.