Together with my then-colleague Kalev Lember, I recently added support for pre-installing Flatpak applications. It sounds fancy, but it is conceptually very simple: Flatpak reads configuration files from several directories to determine which applications should be pre-installed. It then installs any missing applications and removes any that are no longer supposed to be pre-installed (with some small caveats).
Flatpak is unironically dead. It provides next to no security benefits. Single store with no verification of updates. Worse compatibility with other system apps. Its only positive is that it gives developers a single linux platform to target but it even does a bad job at that since the developer experience is subpar compared to snap and app image.
Apart from having a good name its kinda bad at everything.
What’s the advantage of this over a whole-system provisioning system like ansible?
From what I can tell, you wouldn’t use it instead of Ansible or another automation system, but rather just support for a config file you can plot in to make setting up automation with any automation system easier by allowing you to put it into a file rather than a gigantic Flatpak install command.
