Ubuntu No Longer Shipping with Flatpak
In a move that probably won’t come as a shock to many, Ubuntu and all of its official spins will no longer ship with Flatpak installed.
Anyone who has followed the rise of universal package managers like Snap and Flatpak is fully aware of the difference between the two technologies and how one is more distribution agnostic than the other.
I'm talking about Snap, which is driven by Canonical and happens to be the company behind Ubuntu.
Both Snap and Flatpak are great methods for installing software, especially proprietary applications that do not have ports to the more traditional package managers like apt and dnf. Snap and Flatpak make the installation of tools like Spotify, Slack, and Skype considerably easier.
Snap comes pre-installed with Ubuntu, the official Ubuntu spins, and many Ubuntu-based distributions. As well, some official spins also included Flatpak. The combination of apt, Snap, and Flatpak meant users had a plethora of applications to install.
Canonical has made the decision that Ubuntu spins are no longer allowed to ship with Flatpak installed. You can still install Flatpak on Ubuntu and any one of its spins from the standard repositories with the command sudo apt-get install flatpak -y.
This change affects all Ubuntu spins, including Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, Ubuntu Unity, and Xubuntu.
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