Ben, FESCO:
Thank you for your decision to destroy Silverblue, the best thing Fedora has done in the
last 10 years.
The only thing that makes Silverblue useful -- indeed, superior -- as a desktop is the
ready availability of Flatpaks for any application the user could want. Unlike
old-fashioned Fedora, modifying Fedora to accept the regular Flathub is a multi-step
operation, and not one that's easy for standard users. This has allowed us to finally
break out of the longstanding Fedora issue of "Sorry, I can't access that app
because I'm on Fedora".
For the last 3 years, Silverblue has spread through the developer ecosystem because
it's the best immutable desktop. For a short time I dared hope that we'd retake
desktop primacy from Ubuntu! But I should have known better.
If another vendor like Ubuntu or Docker were to do this kind of surprise filtering of
apps, Fedora would attack it and write long blogs taking a stance on user choice and
against vendors using their influence to spread vertical monopolies. But I guess it's
OK if Fedora does it?
If y'all want folks to use Fedora Flatpaks instead of Flathub ones, the answer is to
**make more applications available** via Fedora Flatpaks. Not to restrict user choice
through underhanded BS like this move.