As an update to everyone following, I had a meeting today with the Flatpak SIG and Fedora Project Leader, which was a very good conversation. We discussed the issues, how we got here, and what next steps are. For anyone not interested in the specific details, the OBS Project is no longer requesting a removal of IP or rebrand of the OBS Studio application provided by Fedora Flatpaks. This issue should be used for tracking of the other specific, technical issues, that the Fedora Flatpak does still have, which I will address below. From our perspective, there were two key points that we feel are the most important to address:
- The issue with the Qt runtime having regression
- The issue of not knowing where to report bugs for what is a downstream package
For the first bullet, this should be resolved with the update to the latest runtime, which includes Qt 6.8.2 that has the fixes for those regressions in it. For the second, this is obviously a much larger issue to tackle, especially for a project as large as Fedora. We had some very good discussion on how this might be accomplished in the medium-long term, but don’t consider it a blocker at this point. We plan to stay engaged and offer our perspective as an upstream project. In addition to those two previously blocking issues, we discussed a handful of other problems with the Fedora Flatpak. I’ll keep the details high level in the interest of brevity on this update:
- OBS Studio running on Mesa LLLVM pipe instead of with hardware acceleration (i.e. the GPU)
- X11 Fallback leading to OBS crashing
- VLC Plugin not behaving as expected in the sandbox, needs testing
- Shipping of third-party plugins in the Fedora Flatpak
The discussion was positive and they are actively working to resolve those issues as well, which should hopefully only affect a small number of users. I would like to give a final thank you to Yaakov and the FPL for taking the time to talk to us today.
This whole thing has been kinda wild. Every Linux distro bundles obs linked against their own libraries. Because fedora did it in a flatpak it was suddenly a problem?
I get developers being frustrated by buggy downstream builds flooding their queue with useless reports. They ain’t got time for it and can’t do anything about it. But this is open source software and obs had a bad take on distributing it IMHO.
Glad fedora was able to talk it out with them.
There was an official flatpak and fedora repackaged it into their own flatpak repo “poorly” which OBS did not like, because there where issues that OBS team could not resolve like this
Edit: fact check correction
Source: https://news.itsfoss.com/obs-studio-fedora-feud/
Fedora never called it official. It lacked the verification tick that official Flathub packages get and right under the install button in Gnome Software, the install source says “Fedora Linux”.
You are right! I read that wrong
https://news.itsfoss.com/obs-studio-fedora-feud/
That was kinda my point. If qt breaks them again and arch updates and links the new QT are they going to come after them too? The position OBS took on this originally seemed like an open source disaster. It sounds like they moderated to something reasonable and that’s great.
Yea, I first read the article wrong and thought fedora marketed it as official
Arch is at least more likely to update to a fixed version sooner, and someone getting something with pacman is going to be used to the idea of it breaking because of using bleeding edge dependencies. The difference with the Flatpak is that most users believe that they’re getting something straight from the developers, so they’re not going to report problems to the right people if Fedora puts a different source of Flatpaks in the lists and overrides working packages with ones so broken as to be useless.