Linux app packaging rethink could leave alternative-init distros in the cold
Flatpak development has been very quiet for years. Discussions about a next-generation take are happening – and some of the signs are worrying if, like many FOSS folks, you are systemd-intolerant.In the course of researching our article on MX Linux 25.2, we came across an interesting Reddit discussion from last month, which in turn led us to a Flatpak development blog post from late last year.It looks like a team is collecting ideas for what is currently called "Flatpak-NG" – as in next generation. If this solidifies into code, this may form the basis of Flatpak version 2.
The blog post isn't very informative, but the Reddit thread links to the video of a presentation from last month's Linux App Summit in Berlin, which spells things out more clearly.
The Flatpak-NG idea involves handing off a lot of the isolation in Flatpak from the current bubblewrap layer to an as-yet-unwritten systemd component that the developers are currently calling systemd-appd. This would considerably simplify Flatpak, and enable it to do more isolation, including virtualizing the network stack – but at the price of making Flatpak 2 depend on systemd. A developer who was at the talk, Jorge Castro, later explained and confirmed this in a Fediverse thread.The teams behind other init systems could, of course, write their own replacement for the notional systemd-appd, but that would be a substantial amount of work. The tool that provides the new init-switching functionality in MX Linux 25.1 and 25.2, init-diversity, currently supports six other init systems besides systemd, and we've seen little sign of them cooperating to create an alternative to systemd that provides even a subset of its wider functionality.Flatpak is widely used and supported. Not all distros include it by default, but it's the only widely adopted alternative to Canonical's Snap packaging system.
