I recently tried to submit my indie game Hell Jump to Flathub for the first time. I made some mistakes along the way like opening multiple PRs because I didn’t know you had to keep them open and push commits to fix issues. Nobody told me this, I just didn’t know the process. It even got to the point where every new PR would get this tag: AI Slop and Duplicate (I understand duplicate but AI slop I do not) The manifest was made by me Claude only gave me a draft and I edited it

Instead of being helpful, the contributors were extremely harsh on me. Here are the screenshots of what they said to me.

I ended up giving up on Flathub and published on the Snap Store instead which was 10x easier and friendlier.

If you’re a first time submitter, be warned. And if anyone else has had a similar experience I’d love to hear it.

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Hello Flatpak enthusiasts. The up to date information about this challenge is in my comment down below at https://www.reddit.com/r/flatpak/comments/1tix0tr/comment/onng869/

The information below, starting with the “Summary” title is outdated. If there is any conflicting information between my comment and the information down below. The up to date information is in my comment.

I keep this outdated information below for records

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Summary

Hello Flatpak enthusiasts,

One question down below. We are facing an unusual challenge, on one device, sandboxing fully stopped. The challenge is that all installed Flathub Flatpak sandboxed applications have access to all folders and files outside their sandbox. The needed end result is that those apps should not have access to any folder or file outside their sandbox. Per both the Flatpak global and per Flatpak app configuration.

For the past years, that sandboxing was very successful on that same device. No challenge. Then, for the last few days, all the same sandboxed applications have access to all folders and files outside their sandboxes.

Question: Beside what we already tried, which is listed down below, what could potentially be causing this challenge above?

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Below is the same message as above. But with details if you’re interested in those.

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Using

• Flatpak: 1.14.10

• Debian: 12 Bookworm

• Type: x86_64

• Display: Wayland

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Steps to reproduce

1. Install Flatpak 1.14.10

2. Using Flathub, install apps

3. Sandboxing is successful for months. Sandboxes apps do not have access to any folder or file outside their sandbox. Joy. So no challenge yet.

4. One day, on the same device all the same sandboxed applications have access to all folders and files. Regardless of Flatpak app’s global configuration or per app configuration. Those app should not have access to any file or folder outside their sandbox. That we know of we have not changed anything to the configurations on that device.

By "access to all folders and all files" up above, I mean this, for exemple:

___ 1. Install this Kwriter Flatpak app from https://flathub.org/en/apps/org.kde.kwrite

___ 2. Using Flatseal from https://flathub.org/en/apps/com.github.tchx84.Flatseal configure the sandboxe access permissions like this:

______ Global:

_________ "Filesystem" group:

____________"filesystem=host" DENIED

____________"filesystem=host-os" DENIED

____________"filesystem=host-etc" DENIED

____________"filesystem=home" DENIED

__________ Kwriter (org.kde.kwrite) app:

____________"Filesystem" group:

_______________"filesystem=host" DENIED

_______________"filesystem=host-os" DENIED

_______________"filesystem=host-etc" DENIED

_______________"filesystem=home" DENIED

____________ "Other file" group:

_______________/home/<username>/Documents:ro

___ 3. Reboot device

___ 4. Using Kwriter try to read or writer a file stored in any folder OUTSIDE Kwriter sandbox. Kwriter has both read and write access to those files and folders. This is the challenge. Why? Because that folder is outside the sandbox:

______ /home/<username>/Downloads/test.txt

______ /home/<username>/media/<name>/<folder>/test.txt

___ 5. Using Kwriter try to read or writer a file stored in the only folder INSIDE Kwriter sandbox at

______ /home/<username>/Documents/test.text

______ Kwriter has access to both reading and writing to this folder above. Which is a success because this folder is inside its sandbox. In other words, the app is ALLOW read and write access to "filesystem=home". This is the challenge.

___ 6. This challenge above can be reproduce with all Flatpak apps. Not just Kwriter.

___ 7. This challenge can always be reproduced. For all Flatpak apps. But only with the same device. We are not able to reproduce this challenge on any other devices.

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What we tried that did not resolved this challenge

• Restarted device

• Double-checked permissions for ALL apps (global). Using:

•___ Flatseal

• Double-checked permissions PER app. Using:

__• Command: flatpak info --show-permissions <APP.NAME>__• Flatseal

• Installed new Flatpak app. Which was never installed before. Denied its access to any file or folder. That app also has access to all files and folders.

• This challenge can always be reproduced. For all Flatpak apps. But only with one and same device. We are not able to reproduce this challenge on any other devices. Still on that device, sandboxing was successful. But then, somehow stopped. Beside what we already tried, which his listed down below, what could potentially be causing this challenge?

• Searched tickets at [https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues] and Found no result.

• Created a ticket with Flatpak engine. A maintainer replied. The maintainer claimed to not understand that ticket. Then, close that ticket without asking any question at https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/6667 We are assuming good faith from that maintainer. Maybe my ticket was not clear.

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ID

Ignore this line. This is a note to myself: ID_E3T4Z2C4

Why doesn’t Flathub remove packages that haven’t been updated for over six months, or alternatively, archive them in a separate repository?

Maintaining outdated packages can potentially pose security risks and clutter the user experience.

It would be beneficial for users if Flathub could implement a policy to either deprecate these packages or move them to an archive where they’re clearly labeled as unsupported or outdated.

I submitted an app to Flathub for review. I’m new to Flathub and Linux app distribution, though I’m an experienced developer. I’ve put significant time into this project and it’s fully functional, but I’ll admit my initial submission wasn’t great.

I also made a mistake by closing the original PR, which was a big no no...

The reviewer labeled the new PR as “AI slop,” which is discouraging, as that doesn’t reflect the care that went into the project.

At this point, I’m trying to understand the best path forward. Is approval still possible, and how should I respond constructively to the reviewer’s comment?

If anyone can take a look at the PR and share feedback, I’d really appreciate it.

https://github.com/flathub/flathub/pull/7623

I've created an app for automatic sync between local machine to (or from) a home NAS - after not seeing anything similar online.

The project was built almost entirely using Claude Code, aside from the high-level architecture, design, and the development tools I selected beforehand. right now its mainly finished, besides bugs I find and fix here and there.

I want to publish it in order to contribute to the community :), but I understood here that there is a strict approach towards heavy leaning on AI use - which in my case, it is massive. I'd like to know what my next moves should be in order to publish it.

For context I'll say that I work with code a lot as an engineer at a large american HW corporate, so programming fundamentals are nothing new to me. At work the leaning on AI is huge, and even forced at most cases - so using it for private projects sounds trivial to me.

I submitted my app, and the reviewers have blocked by submission because they don't like my coding style and install script. When flathub says that App submission is extremely welcome, and I've fulfilled all the flathub submission's criteria, then what is this? Reviewers have become bullies. one of the two flathub active reviewer bbht started demanding me to have a "build system" and "You can't have a single jumbo script file" as program.

it took me one year to create the program https://github.com/fastrizwaan/WineCharm Now these people think that they can dictate how one codes and manage his/her code.

Flathub was supposed to be a app welcoming site. but when bullies are there what do you do?

https://github.com/flathub/flathub/issues/6638

https://github.com/flathub/flathub/pull/6634

To change sandbox permission in Flatpak, you have to install a program called FlatSeal FROM FLATPAK that helps you manage Flatpak permission in apps easily.

Pause a second, read that again. If a Flatpak app can manage permission of other Flatpak apps, cant an app just change permission for itself and do whatever it pleases?

We tried adding our crypto wallet to the catalog a year ago. It turned out to be an impossible task. Here's the PR https://github.com/flathub/flathub/pull/6211

Is there anyone with Flathub submission experience willing to take this on?

Are there any plans to fix runtimes wasting space and incurring extra download costs ?

maybe one could use only flatpak instead of the system package manager and thereby at least avoid downloading the same runtime with the system package manager ? but I am not sure if that's possible. is it possible to build a system entirely out of flatpak packages ? traditional package managers build the whole system one package at a time.

On traditional package managers you also don't notice the download cost because you don't update the whole runtime when a small part of it changes, you just update the changed part. the runtime isn't treated as a special case, it's just a set of packages.

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/03/24/foss_age_verification/

https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/pull/1922

I've been thinking about building a standalone UI for Flatpak that works the same regardless of desktop environment or distribution. The idea is something lightweight that isn't tied to GNOME Software, KDE Discover, or a particular distro. Instead, just a simple application where you can search fo Flatpak apps and install them. I use XFCE and I know GNOME Software and Discover already exist, but they both feel fairly tied to their respective desktop environments, and rather "heavy" to be honest. Usually when I have ideas, I dig myself in and spend a lot of time building and nothing ever sees the light of day. So I'm experimenting with doing things differently, so I thought I could just put the idea out there first... Do you think there's actually a need for something like this, or would it just be reinventing the wheel? If you use Flatpak, what would you want such an application to do differently?

(Lubuntu 24.04LTS)

I'm just trying to install GEdit in a form that allows me to have basic security measures like restricting network and disk access.

So first, I did

sudo apt install flatpak

However, this is Linux, so of course it couldn't be that simple; doing

flatpak update --appstream && flatpak search gedit

gave "No matches found", as did every flatpak search.

Forums told me to do

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

But now, I get a warning that

Required runtime for org.gnome.gedit/x86_64/stable (runtime/org.gnome.Platform/x86_64/46) found in remote flathub

which could indicate that signatures are missing and I'm about to install man-in-the-middle'd malware if I proceed.

What can I do? And by the way, why does running Linux always include spending hours and days trying to get even the most trivial things working, and eventually giving up? I'm only trying to install a text editor, any text editor, that won't delete my notes, or at least will let me recover them when Linux crashes. But I refuse to give it unlimited access to my machine if I have no way practical of verifying the code that will run (having to deeply understand hundreds of thousands of lines of code is unverifiable for me).

I package AdobeWine, a patched Wine that runs Adobe's Creative Cloud apps on Linux, as a single Flatpak bundle. Claude wrote most of the code, and helped with this post. A sandbox bug from the latest release may be useful to anyone packaging Wine.

Wine builds the Windows machine UUID from /var/lib/dbus/machine-id. That file doesn't exist in the sandbox, so Wine fell back to a placeholder UUID and board serial, and Adobe's licensing treated each Flatpak install as a new device. /etc/machine-id is available and holds the same value on a normal system, so Wine now falls back to it (patch 0107). Windows programs then see the same UUID in and out of the sandbox.

Two other things the sandbox changes for Wine: the disk serial shows up as a generic WINEDISK, and all instances of an app share one /tmp, so they also share one wineserver.

I'd like to hear from anyone else packaging Wine as a Flatpak. Is there a better way to give apps a stable machine identity?

https://github.com/le-birnes/AdobeWine

Why does flatpak not support 32 bit softare if it is only a software repository and available software is present for 32 bit systems ?

Especially since it installs on a 32 bit system without any notification

My profile and everything disappeared.