Shipping Flatpak applications with an image based system (asg2025)

Flatpak is the de-facto standard for distributing desktop applications across various Linux based systems. It also offers other advantages such as sandboxing. It is particularly useful for image based systems as it installs the applications into a separate location and doesn't try to modify the system. GNOME OS is GNOME's development, testing and QA operating system. It builds the latest and greatest in-development versions of the GNOME desktop and core applications. It is also Linux based system that tries to fully embrace the systemd ecosystem. The applications are however built into the system. While this might be great for testing the apps as they would be in most distros, we also want to build our Flatpak applications from the same build definitions and our users (or more correctly early adopters) prefer to use Flatpak for various reasons. In this talk we'll explore what other image based distributions do to provide Flatpak applications to their users, what users expect from "Flatpak applications" and the various proposals for implementing that in GNOME OS. We hope to be able to present our end result by the time of the conference. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/de/ about this event: https://cfp.all-systems-go.io/all-systems-go-2025/talk/98W9EX/